President Trump played docent-in-chief as he gave an impromptu tour of the paintings and other objects he’s sourced from various locations, including the State Department, to redecorate the Cabinet Room at the White House on July 8.
The tour came at the end of an almost two-hour meeting with his cabinet as they sat around an elliptical mahogany table.
Talking about his attempts to redo the meeting room that was first created in 1934 in the West Wing, he pointed to a wall to his left.
“It had some pictures. There were not many of them and not very good ones,” he said.
Trump then revealed the primary source of his new additions: The White House Vault.
“The vaults are where we have a lot of great pictures and artwork,” he said. “And I picked it all myself, I’m very proud of it.”
There were two metrics by which he made his final selections — presidents he admired and once that were in the right-sized and right-looking frames.
“I’m a frame person. Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,” he told his captive audience.
“Polk (President James Polk) was actually a very good president who’s got the same frame that I needed,” he said. “He was sort of a real estate guy. People don’t realize he was.”
Polk, who served as president from 1845-1849, was the son of a farmer and landowner in Tennessee, who oversaw the largest territorial expansion in U.S. history through the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of California in the Mexican-American War.
Trump has expressed similar annexation desires about Canada and Greenland.
Trump has also been on a mission to give the White House a facelift, from blinging out the Oval Office in gold accents to ripping up sod from the Rose Garden to replace it with a flagstone patio.
Other handpicked presidential paintings in the Cabinet Room include Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and John Adams and his wife Abigail.
Also from the vault? A “very old, storied mirror,” he said pointing to a gold trimmed circular mirror. He also added decorative ceiling medallions around the the hanging lamps.
“They had a chain going into the ceiling,” he explained. “I said, ‘you can’t do that. You have to have a medallion.'”
The president saved the pièce de résistance for the end: A grandfather clock.
Trump revealed the tall, freestanding “gorgeous” clock caught his eye when he visited Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office in the State Department.
“I said, ‘Marco, I love this clock. It’s beautiful. He said, what clock?”
Trump continued: “It’s the clock in the other room, it’s incredible. And nobody gets to see it there. I’d love to take that clock and put it in the Cabinet Room.”
“Marco, said “No, are you serious?”
Trump said he responded with: “I have the right to do it, Marco. And he said, ‘alright’.”
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopa
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump redecorates the White House Cabinet Room
