Donald Trump never promised us a Rose Garden. Nor did he warn us that in his first 100 days, he would rip up the storied Jacqueline Kennedy Garden outside the White House’s West Wing and pave much of it for dancing, making it a glorified patio like the Mar-a-Lago one where he holds court. Nor did he divulge his intentions to force himself on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He muted his obsession with painting over the robin’s egg blue color scheme on Air Force One that the Kennedys had given the presidential plane, and that no commander-in-chief since has considered removing, what with its echoes of blue skies and Tiffany’s boxes.
The through line of Trump’s dark to-do list is blotting out the Camelot aesthetic of John and Jackie Kennedy, erasing the halcyon Jacqueline Kennedy years, when the then 31-year-old First Lady remade the White House long after it was due for a lift following the Depression and World War II. After such bleak days, First Ladies Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower concentrated on the country’s recovery. It took the young presidential spouse (née Bouvier) and mother of two to use her brief, shining moment to return the Executive Mansion to its former glory. She did it and won over the country.
The 47th president wants a White House with all the subtlety of a Russian oligarch’s yacht and a Qatari Sheikh’s palace. Gold tchotchkes abound, including two golden cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s aesthetics may prove to be as unpopular as his tariff-happy taxation of everything from coffee to Camrys. There’s a gulf (of America) between the public’s impression of Trump’s first term and Kennedy’s. According to Gallup in 2023, 90 percent of those polled held a favorable impression of JFK. A scant 46 percent felt the same way towards the first Floridian president.
That’s a lot of ground to make up, and Trump’s left no myth untouched. Erasing Jackie’s magic touch—ordering a coat of robin’s egg blue on Air Force One–was high on his to-do list ever since his first term. He told CBS he wanted a paint job that “looks more like America” and “isn’t a Jackie Kennedy color.” Trump came up with a Democratic blue so dark it looks black, and a Republican red so bright it dominates. For their part, Democrats wanted no paint job at all, and neither did the Air Force generals who would be paying for it. He yearned for his long-awaited Boeing to arrive.
Then, last Sunday, the Qataris came dangling a fully tricked-out luxury 747, the likes of which no president has seen, including the well-to-do Kennedys with their dump of a Boeing 707. The deal had two parts: The plane would first go to the Department of Defense and then to Trump’s presidential library when he finishes his second (or third?) term. Eric and Don Jr. could then squabble over it when they weren’t collecting billions on their own digital currency and the myriad other businesses they’d hustled across the globe when Dad was in the Oval.
There should be a law, and there is. The Constitution strictly prohibits foreign gifts. But that’s never stopped Trump before who said he’d be “stupid” not to accept the Qatari plane, and so would the U.S. Treasury. “The maintenance we spend on those old planes, you wouldn’t even believe it.” That’s the Donald, always thinking of others, but not with his brain, if he believes a Middle Eastern sultan is spending $400 million for nothing in return.
The attached strings are hanging from every overhead bin. If this were Trump’s twist on the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, the president would be midair when the call came in advising him that the aircraft was under Qatari control with a course set for a NATO member with an extradition treaty if he didn’t do exactly as told. Trump actually walked onstage at the 2016 Republican convention to “The Parachutes,” part of the 1997 film’s soundtrack. Life doesn’t imitate art. It cuts and pastes it.
But, alas, Trump may not be getting a shiny new plane under the Christmas tree, after all, just a stocking with three pencils and two dolls. A little due diligence and it turns out the Qataris were trying to dump this plane for years, lowering the price but finding no takers until they found a mark in the author of The Art of the Deal. The 747-8 was illiquid, and its decor appealed to a very small audience of other Qataris and the Donald. Even Middle Eastern oligarchs find millions of dollars in repairs, maintenance, and storage painful. This is why they were happy to unload it and insisted all gifts are final. Who’s the “stupid” one now?
It was audacity, not fortune, when the 47th president pulled off a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this winter. Trump mowed down half its board, replacing them with MAGA loyalists, and its head, Deborah Rutter, with Richard Grenell, the director not of plays but of national intelligence, in his first term. Trump booted the Kennedy Center’s chair, the noted philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubinstein, and installed himself. Almost immediately, Lin-Manuel Miranda canceled Hamilton‘s scheduled performance. To that, Trump huffed, so what, he didn’t like the first Treasury Secretary anyway, even if he was the founder of the New York Post in 1801.
Maybe “My Shot” and “You’ll Be Back” isn’t the vibe of a septuagenarian whose taste runs to Cats, with its three full-blown renditions of his beloved “Memories.” Fortunately, another favorite, Les Misérables, was on the calendar before the hostilities. But in the time it takes to get a drink at intermission, ten members of the Les Miz cast went rogue. Hamilton, he could let pass, but fewer voices belting out “Do You Hear the Voices Sing?” Never! In a statement, Trump lamented the partisan politics; he just wants his Kennedy Center to be “a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for.” Except at board meetings.
Trump has taken over a nationally beloved citadel he never set foot in during his first term, after several of the artists being honored criticized him. Chairing his first board meeting, he proposed that as a “king of ratings,” he should start emceeing the Honors because “every network will start bidding on it, going crazy.” Maybe, but CBS’s broadcast already wins the ratings as it is. Since his second coming, the Washington Post cites a 50 percent drop in ticket sales.
Never mind that. On opening night next month, June 11, Trump will debut as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which could be the Donald J. Trump Center by then. A box seat costs only $2 million, not that much if you consider it includes a VIP reception.
Occasionally, Trump has to go home to eat, pray, sleep, and love—three of those anyway, maybe only two—in a house that Jackie restored to its historically correct state and incidentally invades Trump’s workspace. She traced the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria made from wood salvaged from one of Her Majesty’s ships, to a storage room in the basement, refinished it, and installed it in the Oval Office, where Trump signs Executive Orders of dubious legality. Jackie’s prime time tour of the White House, broadcast on two networks and syndicated to 50 countries, was watched by 56 million people.
As every president does, Trump gets to add some personal touches to his surroundings: choose which of the Founding Fathers’ wigged heads will hang in the Oval Office, the design of the carpet, the material of the drapes, and the placement of family photos. But Trumps gone wild, encrusting anything that doesn’t move with gold lamé, on the fireplace mantel, the ceiling, the Rococo mirrors, gold frames around the portraits (he bumped Obama’s to make room for his), and gold eagles nesting on side tables. There were so many yellow objets behind the president as he called President Voldomyr Zelensky a big loser, it wasn’t farfetched to assume one of them was a trophy Trump collected for being a big winner.
The Oval Office weighed down with metal, Trump moved out of doors to finish Melania’s stripmining of the Rose Garden, which the Kennedys had installed. The main objective was upgrading its slow-draining irrigation system, but Jackie’s crabapple trees somehow disappeared to an undisclosed location in the process. Michael Beschloss, the historian, called Melania’s landscaping an “evisceration” that erased “decades of American history.” He suspected one reason was to clear a better camera angle for her speech at the Republican convention held there due to COVID in 2020. She fired back that he’d misjudged her landscaping: “His misleading information is dishonorable & he should never be trusted as a professional historian.”
Starting any day now, Trump will finish the job unless a curator stops him, ripping out the manicured space to pave it over for a terrace (so womens’ Jimmy Choo stilettos won’t sink in the soft ground), adjoining a ballroom he intends to build (like Mar a Lago’s) so that after dinner he can curl his fingers into a ball and fist dance the night away to “YMCA,” once a gay anthem and now a MAGA hymn.
Melania isn’t around enough to help Trump’s crusade, only 14 days in the last four months, and her jacket back in the first term was a warning that “she really doesn’t care.” The former model is reclusive, largely emerging to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking and showing up. She’ll get a cut of the $40 million documentary about her life produced by Bruce Ratner and streamed by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Inside the White House, she was not keen on her official duties. While Jackie formalized Christmas at the White House with a “Nutcracker” theme her first year and a “Children’s Tree” her second, complete with tours, in 2018, Melania featured 40 blood red trees flanking each side of a hall, spooking the children. A viral meme of white Handmaid’s Tale hats atop the trees spooked the parents, and no tours. About the criticism she should have expected, and may have welcomed, she told her long-time friend and a manager of the 2017 inaugural, who by then was taping her, “What the f**k do I care about Christmas decorations?”
The worst thing Trump could do to the Kennedy legacy was give an outlet to a member of the troubled second generation beset by drugs, alcohol, divorces, and suicides. Over a thousand new cases of measles this month, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is still saying from his position of authority, “There are problems with the vaccines.” At Congressional hearings last week, the 71-year-old wouldn’t give a straight answer to a repeated question about whether he’d vaccinate his own children. After a few more grillings like this, he won’t have the credibility to reduce the additives in Cocoa Puffs.
Kennedy isn’t the worst Trump appointee, but the worst Kennedy ever appointed to a post of such urgency. When the opponent of Vax Americana goes dancing on what was once his aunt’s Rose Garden, and watches Kennedy Center board member Lee Greenwood crooning “Proud to Be an American” at the arts center named for his slain uncle, we will have achieved full Trump. The saving grace is that Jackie, who would be 96 this summer, didn’t live to see it.
