Trump uses Medal of Honor ceremony to boast about his “beautiful ballroom”

Donald Trump used a Medal of Honor ceremony on Monday, meant to honor three Army soldiers, to gush about the drapes he will add to his new ballroom in the White House’s East Wing.

“I picked those drapes in my first term—I always liked gold,” Trump said. “I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”

He later joked about the constant loud hammering, which apparently runs from 6am to 11:30pm: “When I hear that beautiful sound behind me, it means money, so I like it,” the president said. “But my wife isn’t thrilled.” 

As John Jay College art historian Erin Thompson told my colleagues at Reveal, Trump’s renovations are “a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.” 

“The style choices that he’s making are very congruent with his political message, in that he’s appealing to a vision of the past” as “greater than the present,” Thompson continued. 

In the remainder of Trump’s opening remarks, he gave his first public comments on US and Israeli strikes on Iran—bombings that reportedly killed over 100 schoolchildren in Minab, a city in southern Iran. The fighting has resulted in the deaths of four US service members, following Iran’s initial attacks in response to the strikes on Saturday. The president mentioned again during the ceremony that military operations were projected to last four to five weeks but sounded open to a “far longer” conflict.

Trump justified the illegal strikes with old talking points, many of which contradict the federal government’s official assessments and those of nuclear policy experts, including the idea that Iran could soon develop nuclear weapons that threaten allies and could soon reach the US itself—at odds with the administration’s own claims, including a June White House release titled “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated—and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”