All of this adds up to a president who thinks a lot about gold and his legacy. On Friday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that, these days, the political world around Trump “has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it—crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him…. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.”

Toria Sheffield of People magazine reports that at this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters told the audience that the ballroom President Donald J. Trump wants to build next to the White House is “four times the size of the White House.” According to Watters, Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”
—Heather Cox Richardson