The President’s Taste – How Donald Trump Turned the White House into a Disneyland of Vanity

What does a man do who already has everything – power, a golden toilet, and a TV network named after himself? Exactly – he builds himself a monument. And not just any monument, but two gigantic flagpoles that now rise over the White House like oversized toothpicks in a presidential fruit salad. Donald Trump – the aesthete among autocrats, the man who likely believes Claude Monet was a real estate shark in Palm Beach – wrote the next chapter in his architectural revenge against history on Tuesday: two 100-foot flagpoles, a “gift,” as he called it, “that has always been missing from this magnificent place.”

Picture it: on the North and South Lawn now stand the patriotic equivalents of a tacky Texas front yard fence – towering over the White House by some 30 feet. “It is a gift from me,” Trump declared solemnly, “something that has always been missing here.” What was actually missing was probably restraint, dignity – or an advisor with taste. But Trump, who once called himself “the greatest builder since the pyramids,” has his own ideas of grandeur: golden curtains, a Rose Garden that looks like it was landscaped by someone with a vendetta, and now flags so massive that even Kim Jong-un might nod in approval.

Who needs historical substance when you can have symbolism in XXL? Trump’s flags aren’t just meant to fly – they’re meant to roar. They are monuments to a man who believes that greatness is measured in feet and inches, not in ideas or principle. And so now, above America’s most famous address, rises a kind of patriotic aluminum obelisk that whistles the national anthem when the wind blows from the south – while somewhere in the distance, the statue of Abraham Lincoln quietly shakes its head.