As millions of Americans face looming cuts to food aid and healthcare, President Donald Trump chose Friday to showcase a White House bathroom remodel, boasting it had been redone in “highly polished, statuary marble.”
Trump shared photos on his Truth Social platform, explaining that he undertook the project because he was unhappy with the previous “art deco green tile style,” which he described as “totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.”
“I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble,” Trump wrote. “This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”
The response was swift and scathing. Critics slammed the bathroom flex as outrageously tone-deaf amid a series of Republican policies hitting ordinary Americans, including rising tariffs on food and clothing, expiring ACA subsidies, and cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“Sure, you might not be able to eat or go to the doctor, but check out how nice Trump’s new marble s—-er is,” wrote independent journalist Aaron Rupar on Bluesky.
Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh didn’t mince words, directly calling out Trump’s apparent indifference. “Government still shutdown, Americans not getting paid, food assistance for low-income families and children about to be cut off, and this is what he cares about,” Walsh wrote on X. “He’s a psychopath, humanly incapable of caring about anyone or anything but himself.”
Even experts poked holes in Trump’s historical claims. Don Moynihan, political scientist at the University of Michigan, cast doubt on the idea that the bathroom’s marble dated back to Lincoln. “Fact check based on no research but with a high degree of confidence: This is not the marble that was originally in the Lincoln Bedroom,” he said. “It is more likely to be retrieved from a Trump casino before it was demolished.”
Fashion critic Derek Guy, largely sidestepping politics, took aim at Trump’s interior design choices: “White House renovations are currently being spearheaded by someone with famously bad interior design taste.”
This isn’t the first time Trump’s White House renovations have drawn criticism. Earlier this month, he demolished the East Wing to make way for a massive ballroom, financed by donations from some of America’s wealthiest corporations—including Apple, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir—many of which hold government contracts and stand to benefit from deregulation.
For millions of struggling Americans, Trump’s preoccupation with marble bathrooms is more than just a bad joke. It’s a vivid display of priorities that critics call callous, self-centered, and, as Walsh put it bluntly, “psychopath-level.”
