...may not be gold.

Ever wonder where Trump's gilded decor actually came from? You guessed it, the glint is paperthin. It certainly wasn't hammered out by our American forefathers. What's the tariff on Vietnam right now?


data journalist John Keegan claims to have found the original source from which Trump ordered the ridiculous gold-painted faux Rococo slop currently hot glued onto every visible surface of the oval office. In a separate blog, Keegan convincingly compared close ups of the Trump appliques with a set of polyurethane offerings listed by Chinese wholesaler AliBaba.*

The responses to this discovery were unsurprisingly gleeful: tariffs for thee but not for me! So much for a “trade war” with CHAYNAH etc. However, as we all know, hypocrisy does not work on Trump and his ilk; if anything, they bask in it like pigs in shit and leave the rest of us huffing the fumes. Beyond hypocrisy, for years the common interpretation of Trump’s longstanding romance with 18th century gilded kitsch has been that, Trump, like other practitioners of so-called “Dictator Chic” (most of whom, like Saddam Hussein, have since been deposed) wishes to fashion himself in the style of the late Bourbon kings who ruled tyrannically and absolutely over their immiserated French populaces. But this ressentiment towards democracy is only a psychological analysis, albeit with aesthetic undertones. For our purposes it is much more useful to consider what Trump is both communicating with this architectural hatchet job as well as its various precedents, most of which come later in history than one would think.

In my last McMansion Hell post, I deployed the phrase “Regional Car Dealership Rococo” (henceforth RCDR) as a joke, but I think it works well as a broader idea. We can define RCDR as the ad hoc revival of 18th century ornamentation that arose, perhaps inevitably, during a period of skyrocketing income inequality coupled with consolidated global supply chains that brought down the cost of architectural materials. Culturally, it is a weed in Postmodernism’s garden bed.

The comments, however, dispute this comparison, offering instead a different posting from a Vietnamese wholesaler. I find this proposal somewhat unconvincing on a logistical rather than architectural basis, as a site such as Alibaba would be much easier and seamless to order from. The truth is probably in the middle – a similar listing we haven’t yet uncovered.