An 80-year-old president has spent the better part of his second term acting as his own architect, designer, and interior decorator while the country he was elected to lead faces a war, economic anxiety, and a midterm election that could strip his party of power.

"Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations."

— Maggie Haberman, describing the share of Trump's mental energy devoted to construction projects on The Ezra Klein Show

On day 17 of an increasingly unpopular war with Iran, Maggie Haberman says President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and showed her scale models of a ballroom he was building in the White House. The invasion he had ordered was in progress. American sailors were intercepting ballistic missiles in the Middle East. But the president was holding miniature walls and talking about ballrooms.

Haberman, New York Times correspondent and co-author of the bestselling book Regime Change, made the observation on the Ezra Klein Show this week. She estimated that roughly 70 percent of Trump's mental energy is consumed by his renovation projects. When Klein asked whether any policy issues occupied Trump's attention in anything like the same way, her answer was unambiguous: no.

Translation: the commander in chief is spending most of his cognitive bandwidth on real estate.

The scope of Trump's construction fixation is not merely eccentric. It is a structural feature of his presidency. Since returning to office in January 2025, the president has launched more capital projects than any modern president, and he is personally involved in the details of most of them. The pattern is consistent across every project: Trump envisions it, prices it at a fraction of what it actually costs, appoints a contractor he trusts or has worked with personally, and then micro-manages the design. The results are predictably chaotic.

The White House East Wing, one of the oldest and most historically significant structures on the presidential compound, was demolished in October 2025. In its place: a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that Trump initially said would cost $200 million, then $300 million, then $400 million. Internal records from Clark Construction, the contractor on the job, put the wider project at $600 million, with $307 million of that billed directly to taxpayer-funded agencies including the Secret Service.

The Rose Garden was stripped of its lawn and paved over with concrete in August 2025 to create what staff described as a Mar-a-Lago-style outdoor patio. The Lincoln Bedroom bathroom was gutted and refinished in marble that Trump insisted matched the "stylistic period" of Abraham Lincoln's era, despite no evidence that Lincoln's bathroom was marble.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was drained, repainted "American Flag Blue," and filled with water in late spring. Trump said it would cost between $1.5 million and $2 million. The awarded contracts topped $14.8 million. Within weeks, the water turned green from algae blooms and the paint began peeling in sheets. The pool has now been drained for a second time.

Trump responded to the collapse of his pool project by insisting the damage was caused by vandals with knives, box cutters, and razors. His own U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, publicly contradicted him, saying the damage was the result of a "flawed installation by the contractors" caused by the president's insistence on completing the renovation in time for the July 4 bicentennial celebrations. Trump then accused Pirro of incompetence on Truth Social, writing, "I don't know what she was thinking?"

A president who cannot distinguish between poor construction and vandalism is a president who does not understand why his projects are failing.

The vanity projects extend far beyond the White House grounds. Trump has proposed a 250-foot Triumphal Arch at Memorial Circle, adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, that would dwarf the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac. The arch, modeled on Paris's Arc de Triomphe, carries an estimated price tag of $100 million. Veterans groups have sued to block it, calling it an insult to the service members buried at Arlington.

A $40 million "National Garden of American Heroes" is planned for West Potomac Park, a section of the National Mall where Congress has banned new memorials. Preservation groups sued to stop the project in June.

A $22.5 billion plan to rebuild Washington Dulles International Airport is moving forward after Trump personally summoned developers and financiers to pitch him at the White House. Rival firms built tabletop models of the airport so the president could tinker with shuttle buses, parking layouts, and baggage handling himself. He rejected proposals from Ferrovial and Jacobs, and pushed back on a bid from BlackRock that would have taken the airport off the federal balance sheet. The winning plan uses United Airlines as the build contractor, with debt repaid from airport revenue.

Palm Beach International Airport was renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport on July 9, 2026, after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law stripping counties of the authority to name their own airports. The rebranding alone could cost $5.5 million.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is closed for a $257 million renovation after Trump packed its board with allies and tried to append his name to the institution. A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, and Trump's branding was publicly removed from the building in July.

Haberman offered a framework for understanding this behavior that was more telling than the inventory of projects alone. She said Trump's driving question about legacy is not "What am I leaving behind for the world?" but instead "What am I leaving behind so the world can't kick me off the world."

This is the core insight. Trump is not building monuments because he believes in public works. He is building monuments because he believes they are permanent. A policy can be reversed. A law can be repealed. An election can be lost. But a ballroom carved into the White House, a 250-foot arch next to Arlington, an airport named for him on concrete signs: these are things that supposedly endure.

The problem is that most of them do not. The Reflecting Pool failed within weeks. The Kennedy Center renaming was reversed by a judge. The ballroom is over budget and over schedule. The arch faces litigation. The Dulles plan requires years of congressional approval. Even the Rose Garden can be reseeded.

Trump's vanity projects are not legacy. They are evidence of a deep, inescapable insecurity about being forgotten.

The timing of this obsession is what makes it politically devastating. Trump's approval rating has fallen to approximately 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency and approaching the levels only Richard Nixon reached in the final weeks before resignation. The Iran war, which the president initiated in February, is deeply unpopular. Americans are paying higher prices for gas and groceries. The midterm elections in November are shaping up to be a bloodbath for Republicans.

Meanwhile the president is moving golden statues around in a miniature airport model.

MAGA figures who once served as his most loyal enforcers are now openly rebelling. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, and Joe Kent announced this weekend that they are forming a new anti-Trump political movement. Greene wrote on X that Trump "betrayed us all," citing the Iran war as the breaking point. Trump responded by calling Greene a "traitor" and Carlson a "low IQ person."

Two Republican senators, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, are blocking the confirmation of Trump's pick for attorney general, Todd Blanche, unless Blanche provides written assurance that a $1.776 billion compensation fund for Trump's political allies is dead. Trump responded with an ultimatum on Truth Social, threatening to push the Anti-Weaponization Bill anyway if they did not comply. It was the first time the president openly threatened his own senators over a confirmation vote.

Trump's approval is in freefall and his party is fracturing from both the right and within its own ranks. His response to all of this: 43 Truth Social posts on a single Saturday afternoon, including AI-generated images of himself as Elvis Presley and as a Revolutionary War general, despite having avoided the draft five times.

Haberman said Trump is "vastly less interested in and reactive to domestic politics this time." That may be the most damning assessment of a sitting president in the modern era.

The question is not whether Trump's obsession with construction and self-monumentalization is unusual. Every president wants to leave a mark. The question is whether a president who spends seventy percent of his mental energy on interior decoration and airport models is fit to lead a country at war.

Maggie Haberman said he showed her ballroom models on day 17 of an invasion. That is the story right there. The rest of the projects are just receipts.

trump, government, politics, midterms