I Know What Trump’s D.C. Makeover Is Really About: MS NOW Anchor

President Donald Trump’s gaudy “Mar-a-Lago facelift” of the White House has resurrected the very royal pageantry America declared independence from 250 years ago, MS NOW host Katy Tur says.

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Long known for its understated elegance, the White House once served as a “symbol of who we are as Americans,” Tur said on The Daily Beast Podcast. “We are a country that broke away from a monarchy. We rejected the trappings of a monarchy. We rejected the gold leaf of the monarchy.”

“It’s not real, and it’s not authentic. It’s not American any longer,” Tur told host Joanna Coles. “We are not a country of gaudy decorations. We’re not a country of gold leaf.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We are a country of like, down-home, homespun, pick yourself up from your bootstraps… grit and determination,” she continued. “That’s who we are as a country. That’s what we started out as. And he’s trying to change it unilaterally.”

Tur, who began covering Trump on the campaign trail in 2015, added that the president is “so enamored with the pomp and circumstance of royalty and of dictatorships that he is… trying to literally glue it onto the White House piece by piece.”

In their new book Regime Change, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan revealed that Trump personally affixed some of the gold adornments to the walls of the Oval Office with a bottle of superglue.

Trump also boasted to the authors that he wields more power than some of history’s most bloodthirsty tyrants, naming Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, among others.

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The president has never made a secret of his fondness for monarchies. Before visiting the Palace of Versailles in France last month, he gushed, “Versailles is not a gold leaf. Versailles is the real deal.” Trump has said he modeled his Mar-a-Lago golf club after the palace, which is filled with more than 1,000 kilograms of 22-carat gold and was built primarily by King Louis XIV.

Tur said that there is “a brazenness” to the way Trump goes about his vanity projects that unsettles Americans, noting that the president tore down the East Wing without telling the American public and despite previously saying he would leave it untouched: “Suddenly, it was gone.”

“While Americans might not be able to pinpoint exactly why they feel uncomfortable with it, they do feel uncomfortable with looking at how he’s physically changed the White House, physically trying to change Washington,” she said.

But she argued the American public is “pushing back,” pointing to a string of Republican losses in special elections and pushback from courts, like when Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center after a federal judge ruled that he needed congressional authorization.

“The reaction to Donald Trump has not been muted,” she said. “And so if I am feeling hopeful about this democracy and hopeful about what will happen to us afterwards—and there’s a whole lot of reasons not to be hopeful—I look to all of the ways in which the system, even under all of this stress, is continuing to hold.”