Palm Beach approximation
I just want to start the day with this one paragraph from an Atlantic piece on Trump by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer.
He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Small and yet so very…
I would think more like turning the Rose Garden into a golf course, but yes, very….
I read the whole thing and feel sick. I don’t think I’ve ever loathed one person quite so much.
I don’t know how many of us here have seen the Trump Tower lobby in NYC, but I have. The gilded, gaudy, gauche (g words anyone?) extremes of it are hard to describe. It was like being enveloped in a toxic mixture of gilded superficiality and intense bombasity. I’m not sure what the point is. It wasn’t impressive, it didn’t make me feel small (like say, the Colusseum, the Vatican, or the Great Pyramids (the latter of which I haven’t seen)), but it was, to me, a statement of over the top, nouveau riche swaggering excess. Not artistic, not awe inspiring or scary, nothing like that. Just phony and gross. What you’d expect from a vain egomaniac. Are us average folks supposed to be impressed? I wasn’t.
Unfortunately, a lot of them are. Too many people equate ‘wealth’ with ‘gold everywhere’. No taste required; just extravagance.