Redecorating the White House has become competitive between President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump, according to a book about the inner workings of the administration.
The reported interior design contest between the first couple has apparently created a headache for staff, who have found themselves in the middle, according to Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
“The President’s redecorating generated such a flurry of activity that staff often felt caught between the two Trumps, who were the only presidential couple to regularly use and maintain separate bedrooms since Richard and Pat Nixon,” Haberman and Swan write, according to an excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail.
Trump, who, according to the book, has transformed the space known as the second-floor “living room” into his private bedroom, has been known to redecorate and move items around while his wife is away. Melania, who reportedly sleeps in the adjacent master bedroom, splits her time between the White House and the family’s residences in New York and Palm Beach, Florida.
“Items were spirited from the second-floor corridor into the President’s bedroom,” Haberman and Swan write. “Sometimes Trump carried the objects in himself, rearranging things across the private quarters on a whim.”
Sources told the authors that the president “seemed almost to be competing with [Melania]—determined to have the better room.”
Items that have taken Trump’s fancy include a gold-leaf mirror that Melania reportedly picked out during a first-term redesign of the Queen’s Bedroom. Now the mirror hangs along Trump’s Presidential Walk of Fame.
“Once, when staff gently reminded the president that he was taking things from the Center Hall his wife had personally selected, he made clear he didn’t care,” according to the book.
“Trump’s obsessive focus on interior decorating made the staff yearn for the first lady to return and hopefully rein him in,” the authors also write.
The first couple had very different visions for the Rose Garden, and reportedly clashed over Trump’s plans to pave over the grass.
In the summer of his second term, Trump ripped out the grass in the Rose Garden, redesigned in the 1960s overseen by first lady Jackie Kennedy, and transformed it so it now resembles the patio at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
“When early talk made the rounds that Trump now intended to turn the garden into a version of the Mar-a-Lago patio, word came back from the First Lady’s team that she was very unhappy,” according to the book.
The president has alluded to his wife’s discontent before. “I took a little heat from my wife. She said, ‘Darling, what did you do with my grass?’” Trump said earlier this year. “I said, ‘People got tired of standing in mud.’”
Melania reportedly compromised and agreed to let Trump pave over the grass, but the rose bushes were to remain intact, according to the book.
Trump previously claimed that the White House was “s*** house” when he moved in.
“The columns were falling down, the plaster was falling off,” he said during a speech in May. “This place is tippy top now, including all the brand new beautiful stone.”
