Trump’s White House Makeover: From Magnolia to Mar-a-Lago

A magnolia removed. A garden paved. A ballroom proposed. What Trump’s aesthetic tells us about his presidency.

Donald Trump’s physical changes to the White House—some practical, others performative, many purely indulgent—reveal more than taste. They tell a story of a presidency obsessed not with preservation, but with spectacle. What begins with the loss of a tree ends in the construction of a myth.

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