Good morning. A coalition of 19 states sued to block the Trump administration’s plan to strip federal funding from hospitals providing gender-related care for minors. Trump’s campaign against tankers is paralyzing Venezuela’s oil industry. And Volodymyr Zelensky said he was open to a demilitarized zone in eastern Ukraine. We’ll get to more news below. But first, let’s visit the White House.
Welcome to the Oval OfficePresident Trump has been redecorating the Oval Office. He’s almost out of wall space. He has made it an extravagant room. Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls. “He’s a maximalist,” Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, told The Times. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk.
Portraits abound in the Oval, more than 20 of them, mostly of presidents past. Trump has regularly added and swapped out items in the room, and he has recently added a portrait of the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. It hangs by the fireplace, the only image of a woman in the Oval. A gold statuette of an eagle flying over the Constitution arrived last month near the flags behind the desk. A wooden box with a red button sits on it, near a golden presidential seal. When Trump presses the button, a valet comes quickly with a glass of Diet Coke and ice on a gleaming silver tray. Gold is a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success, an art historian who specializes in art during Louis XIV’s France told The Times. “He’s really setting up a kind of stage — a gilded stage for his presidency,” he said. Please, sit
The extravagance of Trump’s interior decoration may see its apex around the fireplace, where he has played host to more than two dozen world leaders since January. Golden antiques cover the mantel. Nearby, credenzas bear golden feet beneath golden appliqués on the wall. A bust of Winston Churchill sits behind the president’s chair. A portrait of George Washington looms above the fireplace. Additional gold carvings and trim on the mantel appeared in March. By August, there was a gilded fireplace screen. The Oval Office has never been plain, of course. But the difference between Trump’s version of it and the one presented by previous presidents is stark. Behind closed doorsThe room is also more insular now. In past administrations, aides used a small peephole in one of the doors leading to other parts of the West Wing, allowing them to monitor the progress of meetings. Trump has blocked it with new mirrors. If the door is closed now, they cannot see what is happening in the room. All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they’re just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends. Take a look around
To document the extent of the Oval Office renovations, and to allow us to explore the room at home, Doug Mills, our longtime White House photographer, took more than 600 overlapping photographs of the room. On a single day in October, he shot from every angle imaginable to capture the complexity of the renovation and the details within it. Then a team of Times journalists got to work bringing them to life. (You should know their names: Ashley Wu, Junho Lee, Marco Hernandez, Katie Rogers and Mika Gröndahl.) Doug captured images of objects from multiple angles. The Times team used a computer program that processed the overlapping photos to determine the location of objects in 3-D space. The program then synthesized this information into a single 3-D representation of the office. A lot of reporting, design work and coding followed. And now you can explore a 360-degree view of Trump’s Oval Office here. Now, let’s see what else is happening in the world.
The Justice Department released nearly 30,000 more pages from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, and Times reporters spent yesterday digging through them. Here are some takeaways:
The deputy attorney general said the Justice Department was sifting through nearly a million pages of documents from the investigation. More releases have been promised.
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Standing together for a free and religiously pluralist society is a Christmas thing to do, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes. This was the year when Americans from the left and the right revolted against tried-and-true processes, John Fabian Witt writes. The Times Sale starts now: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
The masculinity crisis: Parul Sehgal looks at how a 2006 book by Norah Vincent, “Self-Made Man,” presaged the manosphere. The memoir’s about Vincent’s time spent disguised as a man in male-only spaces, and it has taken off recently. “In the view of her new fans, Vincent is the rare woman who gets it, who can cop to male pain because she has experienced it,” Parul writes, before quoting a Reddit post from one of them: “She truly understood us in ways that most of society can’t.” Read the whole essay. Your pick: The Morning’s most-clicked link yesterday was about two new murals attributed to Banksy. A night at the opera: The Metropolitan Opera is courting influencers in an attempt to attract a younger audience. A filmmaker: Robert Nakamura, known as the godfather of Asian American media, drew on his childhood experience in an internment camp during World War II to explore themes of identity and racism. He died at 88.
112.5 billion— That is how many pieces of mail and packages the U.S. Postal Service — an agency that’s part Santa Claus, part federal emissary — delivered last year.
College football: Former Georgia defensive end Damon Wilson II has sued the school’s athletic association, alleging that the Bulldogs tried to punish him for entering the transfer portal. |
