“I will be so presidential, you won’t believe it,” President-elect Trump famously said, regularly, over the course of his campaign.
But that pivot has yet to arrive.
Or has it? As with most things Trump, it depends upon what you mean by “presidential.” As promised, he has already become the Shaker-Up-in-Chief, establishing new behavioral norms
across the board, from continuing to fire off his combustible 3 a.m. tweets, to packing his cabinet with billionaires and military generals, to maintaining his laissez faire attitude toward the
concepts of nepotism and conflicts of interest involving his children and his businesses.
He is also rejiggering everything related to the customary idea of a first family. It was news that
Melania and Barron won’t join him in the White House until the end of the school year. Now it has been reported that Trump transition aides are already planning for an office of the First Family
in the East Wing, where the current office of the First Lady is located. It looks as though his daughter Ivanka will perform that role, and that she will move to D.C. with her family, while Melania
remains in New York City with Barron.
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But the big optic thing Trump has not updated for the last 30 years, from the time he moved in with Ivana and his young family, are the over-the-top
furnishings of his Trump Tower triplex.
Starting with the massive golden double doors that visitors pass through, the place seems extremely oligarchically correct. I wonder how someone so
attuned to optics, who is the President to “all the people,” as he said recently when he was defensive about getting stars to entertain at his inauguration, wouldn’t want to change
that picture to something more inviting and democratic.
Because as a real estate guy, he certainly has multiple compounds to choose from.
Although he’s always branding, he barely
mentions two of the residences he has already used for official business: the main house on his Trump National golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey and Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Florida,
where he is now spending the Christmas holidays with his family.
For Trump the brandmaster, Mar-a-Lago has proven to be an undeniably canny -- and even visionary -- investment. He bought it
for a relative song in late 1985: $5 million for the house and property and $3 million for the antique furnishings.
The paltry price was partly due to his mind-bogglingly aggressive and
unfriendly litigation with the locals, which reportedly included threats of building a wall to block the ocean view.
Once he restored and developed the place as a private club, the
future President managed to establish a Trump-emblazoned beachhead for celebs, visiting “dignitaries,” journalists who interviewed him, and the international philanthropy set who attend
the fund-raising galas held in the ballroom. (Speaking of celeb royalty, Trump helped sell them memberships by floating the idea in the press that Prince Charles was buying in. The prince, apparently,
was not amused.)
Perhaps, when he bought Mar-a-Lago, Trump was taking the long view, fantasizing about the presidency even 30 years ago. It seems that Mar-a Lago (a bit of mangled Spanish
meaning sea-to-lake) was built in the late 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post, a cereal heiress, and her then-husband, E.F. Hutton (of Wall Street fame), with an eye toward eventually turning it into
a winter White House.
Sure beats Camp David.
As for more standard, WASPY Presidential optics, nothing beats Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey manse.
The area is a very
moneyed, rural enclave in horse country, where former First Lady Jackie Kennedy learned to ride as a girl, and later owned a farm. The name also suggests “Westminster: the dog show, not the
Abbey. And certainly, it was “Best in Show” with Mitt looking like a beautifully groomed standard poodle, Monsieur Willard, arriving for his interview. Masters of Wall Street, the
universe, and the Social Register have tended to live there unflashily for generations, like the Forbes family. (Publisher Malcolm’s son Steve also ran for President.)
Trump’s main
New Jersey house -- a massive colonial with white columns -- looks old-fashioned and American, damn it, like out of a movie as opposed to the images of world leaders and Cabinet seekers passing
through the chaotic, blocked-off, marble-entombed entryway of Trump Tower.
And having the cameras poised at the front doors in New Jersey, complete with the brass knockers, allowed us
to see all the back-patting, warm leave-takings, with both Pa Trump and Ma Pence kindly seeing the contender to the porch. (Even if, like poor Mitt, in the end they were not offered a rose.)
This was so different from the whole Roll of Shame departure created for the just-fired losers of “The Apprentice” to suffer. We watched them roll their suitcases into the empty
elevator, descend all those floors, and then roll out of the building, to stand in the empty, dark street alone, hailing a cab while the doorman looked on, refusing any help.
Back to New
Jersey and the clubhouse there. It turns out that Trump bought the property from John DeLorean, the inventor of the eponymous gull-winged car that played a starring role in the movie “Back to
the Future.” Seems as if this brings the symbolism of the winning Trump phrase, “Make America Great Again,” full circle.
Visually, Bedminster is still the epitome of the
1950s Eisenhower era, a perfectly designed and manicured enclave for white people with money.
Maybe that idea of going backwards in time comes across too starkly, and he thinks his
voters would rather imagine themselves covered in gold.
It will be interesting to see how (or perhaps even whether) after being sworn in as President, Trump inhabits the White House: a place,
unlike the other Trump properties, that he hasn’t bought or branded. Let the pivoting begin.