Perusing the transcript of President Donald Trump’s recent Oval Office interview with Time magazine can be disorienting. The frequency with which he ping-pongs between topics, and the extent of his tangents, leaves the reader wondering if he remembered the question he’d been asked. The closest the president came to locking in was when asked about his plans for the Kennedy Center and his many, many renovations and alterations of the White House.
In the process, Trump asked possibly the most self-reflective thing he’s ever uttered: “I say to people, am I a better builder or politician?”
Another deluge of details about wood restoration followed, but in that question, we hit upon the essence of his second term. Trump has run into political limits he lacks the political talents to overcome. But through his ever-growing list of projects, as Time’s Eric Cortellessa wrote, “he is absorbed with the physical details of a world he can remake to his liking.”
Trump asked possibly the most self-reflective thing he’s ever uttered: “I say to people, am I a better builder or politician?”
Trump has honestly never been very good at either being a politician or a builder, at least not in the traditional sense. That may sound petty given his name still graces several skyscrapers and he is a two-term president. But he’s brought the same mindset to both endeavors, where micromanaging over unimportant details and an obsession with selling himself as a brand has left massive, big picture problems unaddressed.
Part of the problem is the mythos Trump has created for himself, one where his election was all America truly needed to become great again. The country’s current ills all either stem from a previous president’s mistakes or simply do not exist in his reality. There’s no need to develop a strategy on inflation or address the obvious flaws in planning ahead of the Iran war when acknowledging a problem is an admission of powerlessness or fallibility.
The Republican lawmakers who looked to Trump for political leadership have little to show for it. Since returning to office, he has alternately bullied, ignored or left the House and Senate begging for guidance on policy and legislation. The president still sees himself as the best salesperson the GOP has, but his pending return to the hustings haven’t forestalled the looming sense of dread evident in flurries of (usually anonymous) quotes from candidates and staffers.
Much easier, then, for Trump to dwell on his dwelling and the ways he can transform Washington in a more concrete way. After all, in Trump’s telling, he singlehandedly prevented the White House from collapsing: “I got to fix it. And I do that better than anybody else. Maybe I do it better than anything I do, and it’s easy for me. It’s actually relaxing. You know, for a lot of people, it drives them crazy. For me, it’s relaxing.”
Roughly 20% of Trump’s responses to Time were dedicated to the Kennedy Center, which he refused to say wouldn’t be demolished on his watch, and to his White House renovations. The latter, he insisted, were sorely needed, taking the time to point out specific areas around the Oval Office that were in apparent disrepair.
“Look at that board,” Trump insisted. “See that woodwork? It’s what I do best, I guess.”
With a construction project, be it an overlarge ballroom or an arch/sniper tower, there are phases that are clear and tangible. While there are always unknown variables, from the time there are blueprints and renderings until the final details are installed there’s a vision at work. And best of all, when the work is done it remains as a testament to its creator.
Trump has been trying to build his legacy as a politician in stone and steel
Or at least, that’s how it works in theory. Already some of the president’s political foes are speaking of tearing down every one of Trump’s cherished projects brick-by-brick once he leaves office. Down goes the ballroom, up comes the concrete patio he’s paved over the Rose Garden. The proposed “triumphal arch” overshadowing the Lincoln Memorial reduced first to a memory, then to a line in a history book.
When closing out the interview, the president told Time that he’s been asking his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, for six months now to come up with a statement to preserve his changes to the Oval Office. The gilded sconces and gold bric-a-brac he installed would be “a federal landmark.” It seems unlikely, given the way each president has altered the room to suit their own tastes, but far be it from something like precedent to impede this president.
In that way, Trump likely knows the answer to his own question. If he truly believed he were a better politician, he’d have put more effort into developing the skills he lacked and honing the talents he already possessed. He has failed as a statesman and as a war leader and has shown no interest in lawmaking or coalition building. Instead, Trump has been trying to build his legacy as a politician in stone and steel, crafting monuments to himself now rather than giving future generations the chance to refuse.
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