In his second term, Donald Trump has made major changes to the look of the White House, including tearing down the East Wing to build a new ballroom and decorating the Oval Office with gold accents that former President Barack Obama, on the campaign trail, compared to the decor motifs at the Cheesecake Factory.
Every president makes decorating changes to the White House, but Trump this week took steps to make this a bit more permanent.
Donald Trump Meeting Creative Commons Photo
President Donald Trump participates in a Board of Peace meeting at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., Thursday, February 19, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
On Thursday, to show his priorities just two days after his party suffered a historic wipeout in the midterm elections, Trump signed an executive order establishing the Oval Office as a “national monument.”
The order applies to the Oval Office itself, as well as the Outer Oval Office and the Cabinet Room.
It directs the Secretary of the Interior to “develop and implement a management plan with relevant executive departments” before making any major changes to those parts of the White House.
“We’re making it a national monument, and it will not be allowed to be touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, to build something in a slightly different shape,” Trump told reporters Thursday, per the BBC.
The White House, in its entirety, is already a National Historic Landmark.
The New York Post reported that it was the third day in a row that Trump had spoken publicly about one of his renovation projects, after he visited the Reflecting Pool on Tuesday and the ballroom site press tour on Wednesday. All of this happened, of course, during an election week.
“There’s no major modification without the approval of Congress. So if they want to say,’ Let’s not have the Oval anymore; let’s make it square,’ what happens is they have to go back to Congress,” Trump said this week.
Why Now?
It’s unclear why the order was necessary, since there’s no indication that any future president plans to tear down or radically alter the Oval Office.
After all, the only recent president to tear down any part of the White House is Trump himself, for his beloved ballroom project.
That project has been the subject of ongoing litigation over whether Trump had the right to tear down part of the White House without Congressional authorization.
It’s possible, or even likely, that Trump’s Cheesecake Factory-like golden accents will be removed by the next president, who may not want their workspace to resemble one of Trump’s old hotels in Atlantic City.
But this executive order wouldn’t prevent that.
The next president, in fact, could issue their own executive order to pre-empt Trump’s.
The order also says that it does not “restrict the President’s authority to redecorate the monument, select furnishings, or make ordinary operational and security modifications that do not substantially impair the monument’s historic structure or architectural character.”
Why the Oval?
What are the origins of this obsession?
Trump said in a Time magazine interview published in early October that someone from the Secret Service told him he needed to “knock down the Oval Office…and build a new one,” a suggestion the president resisted.
“My [expletive], you can’t build a new one,” Trump told Time, calling the current Oval Office “special.” The Secret Service, after all, does not have the power to overrule the president.
The British, during the War of 1812 in August of 1814, set fire to the White House, and it’s believed to have been a target of the 9/11 hijackers, before United Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania before reaching Washington.
But the presidential residence hasn’t been in any danger since.
Presidential “Hypocrisy”
Greg Werkheiser, an attorney with a law firm called Cultural Heritage Partners, accused the president of hypocrisy after issuing the Oval Office order, citing Trump’s other actions in Washington, including his push to renovate the Kennedy Center.
“On the one hand, he’s talking about the importance of preserving the Oval Office – which is legally meaningless because he can’t do it,” Werkheiser told the BBC.
“And on the other hand, he is absolutely taking an axe to the law that allows us to preserve other historic sites.”
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has written thousands of articles on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.
