Donald Trump struggled to remember exactly what he had done as he revealed his latest gaudy addition to the White House.
The 79-year-old was speaking on The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday, the second part of host Laura Ingraham’s interview with the president.
Monday’s interview saw Fox News host Laura Ingraham surprisingly push back on some of Trump’s answers over affordability and flight shutdowns.
The sequel saw Ingraham given a personal tour of the White House by Trump. That included the Presidential Walk of Fame, which he installed in the White House colonnade. The area sits adjacent to the newly renovated Rose Garden.
Trump got confused after he boasted to Ingraham, pointing to a sign that reads, “The Presidential Walk of Fame.”
“Take a look at this if you want to see detail,” Trump said. “Most people do a sign and paint it on the wall. So that’s half-inch thick bronze. Carved by a very talented person. And it’s brass. It’s pure brass.”
“You can’t just do that, that’s quality, right?”
While brass and bronze are both copper alloys, they are not the same thing. Brass is mixed with zinc, while bronze uses tin. They differ in color, with brass being closer to gold and bronze being reddish-brown.
California governor and pre-eminent Trump troll Gavin Newsom was quick to weigh in on the president’s curious comments.
“Bronze. Brass. Brain damage. Trump’s holy trinity,” Newsom wrote on X, sharing video of the Fox footage on his Press Office account.
Not content with golden frames on the presidential portraits, Trump also proudly told Ingraham he is getting new plaques made with a brief description of each leader.
“Important, right?” he asked Ingraham. “They are beautiful, beautiful bronze plaques, goes up under each picture.”
Ingraham asked Trump who thought of the Walk of Fame. “My idea,” he said. “Everything is my idea, sadly.”
Trump also managed to diss former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis during his Fox News tour, saying his renovations were at “a higher level.”
Guiding the host into the Palm Room, which connects the front of the White House to the Rose Garden and West Colonnade, Trump said the area was designed by Kennedy, who was first lady between 1961 and 1963.
“So this room was in terrible shape. This was done by Jackie Kennedy... She took this area,” Trump said. “We had little tiles, all broken, cheap, out of a box, the walls weren’t good. I took it and I restored it, I put in new chandeliers. They had lanterns that were terrible.”
During her time at the White House, the first lady oversaw redecorations of a number of public areas, including the Red Room, the Treaty Room, the Lincoln Sitting Room, and the Blue Room. However, it is not immediately clear if she also renovated the Palm Room, also known as the West Garden Room, as Trump claimed.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
The style icon, who was married to President John F. Kennedy, took pride in furnishing the White House with fine art and fixtures.
“Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there,” Kennedy told Life magazine in 1961. “It would be a sacrilege merely to redecorate it—a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”
The president, whom Fox News called “Designer Donald,” then talked up his renovation prowess compared to Jackie O.
“It was a nothing room, it was an embarrassment. To come to the Oval Office, you had to go to this room; it was an embarrassment, OK. I took it down and rebuilt it, same as she had it, but at a much higher level.”
He added modestly, “Nobody can build as good as me.”
As Ingraham breathlessly listened to Trump talk about marble and air conditioner vents, she asked if the president’s children had “that same delicate attention to detail that you have,” noting “you can’t really teach that.”
“I think they do,” Trump said. “I think Eric is very good. Don, in a very different way, is good. Ivanka is, you know, ah, Tiffany’s very smart, she was a great student, actually they’re all great students. And I think Barron is going to be tremendous at that, he’s very meticulous.”
Trump confirmed that his youngest son, who is a sophomore at New York University, was still living at the White House.
“He’s done a good job,” Trump told Ingraham. “He’s tall. He’s a tall one.”
The Fox News host gushed to the president that she’d heard rumors that Barron was now the most likely to be the next President Trump, saying, “A lot of people are wondering which child could be next?”
“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “In a certain way, they all could,” he said before getting distracted by one of his signs and changing the conversation.
The president also attempted to show Ingraham where his $300 million vanity ballroom will be built; however, their tour, which took place “after a long day,” according to the host, meant the renovations were barely visible on camera.
“It’ll go from here to there,” Trump said, pointing, “and it will seat a proper number of people and the White House will finally have, after 150 years, the ballroom they wanted. It will be beautiful. One of the most beautiful in the world.”
During Monday’s interview, Ingraham asked Trump about reports that Melania had “privately raised concerns” about the demolition of the East Wing, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.
Melania “told associates it wasn’t her project,” according to the report.
“She loved her little tiny office,” Trump told Ingraham, seemingly confirming his wife was not pleased with the demolition of her workspace.
“You know what? She is very smart. In about one day she... if you would ask her now, she says it’s great.”
During the Tuesday tour, Trump did show off an item salvaged from the rubble of the East Wing, which had now been placed in the colonnade: a statue of former President Abraham Lincoln.
“This was done by the carver who did Mount Rushmore,” Trump said, referencing sculptor Gutzon Borglum. “This was taken from the East Wing. We took all the good stuff.”
