Trump’s half-assed persona is leaking into every decision – and he’s failing

Every pensioner should have a hobby. So, an 80-year-old man decorating his home with gold appliqués feels harmless enough, something to be welcomed. But, unlike most 80-year-olds, Donald Trump is running the world’s most powerful nation – and his house is surrounded by rubble. The fact that Trump has more than once been discovered by his staff sticking gold decoration onto parts of the White House is not the most shocking revelation in Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump – a new book on the Trump presidency by two New York Times reporters – but it might, quietly, be among the most telling. Most renovations to a historic building owned by the American people are carefully planned over the course of months, if not years, to make sure they are faithful to its history, use appropriate materials and methods, and are considerate of future occupants. Shorts Trump bothers with none of that. Instead, he does whatever appeals to his taste, such as covering over the Rose Garden with concrete to make a patio, and applying endless ornamentation elsewhere. For small details, that’s harmless enough – but Trump always has his eyes on bigger projects. He demolished the East Wing of the White House with little more than AI-generated plans for a ballroom, complete with stairways to nowhere (and other AI hallucinations), in their place. Without proper plans and permits, construction has stalled, leaving Trump fastidiously decorating a building site. This kind of handiwork is becoming visible all across Washington DC. President Trump ordered a rush job to fix long-standing problems with the reflecting pool on the National Mall, giving the contract to a company owned by someone he knew from Mar-a-Lago. The White House and the ongoing ballroom construction this month. Without proper plans and permits, construction has stalled, leaving the President fastidiously decorating a building site (Photo: Al Drago/Reuters) No sooner had the pool reopened than it was filled with algae and its fresh paint already peeling. Trump insisted the pool had been damaged by vandals who, he claimed, had left a slash hundreds of feet long – but now that the pool has been drained for remedial work, it is visible to everyone that his rush job did the damage. Trump tried to do all sorts of things with the Kennedy Centrw for the Performing Arts in DC, too. First, he tried to install his own team and run a Trump-friendly season of shows. Then, he tried to add his name to Kennedy’s. And when both of those initiatives failed – artists refused to perform, and the courts overturned the addition of the Trump name to the brand – he tried to shut the building down entirely for the rest of his term. Once you start to see Trump’s pattern, it’s everywhere. The President got impatient because building a new Air Force One was taking too long, so he got Qatar to give him one – only for it to emerge that it doesn’t have the necessary defensive capabilities, leading to an embarrassing retrofit. Trump couldn’t be bothered to convince Congress to pass his extensive tariff plans, even though they were the economic centrepiece of his campaign for a second term as president. Instead, he forced them through by executive order, seeming to believe that the bodge job would hold – only to see them reversed by the Supreme Court, leading the federal government scrabbling to refund hundreds of billions of dollars in payments. Trump signed dozens of executive orders on his first day as President. He has continued to prefer them to legislation, but seems unaware that they are weaker than laws and can be overturned by a future president just as easily as they were signed by him. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was drained for repairs following a series of setbacks including the growth of algae and peeling paint which the President alleged was the work of vandals (Photo: Alex Wroblewski/AFP) Even when it came to a matter as grave as war with Iran, Trump skipped over the slow and methodical work of building an international coalition, stating a clear aim for the conflict, making the case to the American people, and getting congressional approval for the war. Instead, he unilaterally started bombing, promising the conflict would be over within just “two weeks”. Now, nearly five months later, one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes is blocked, US forces are fighting and dying, the war is deeply unpopular with the American people, and there is no exit in sight. Trump’s entire persona was built on the television show The Apprentice, which portrayed him as a CEO who could make huge things happen, whether that was hiring and firing or overseeing major construction projects. Instead, America is being left to reckon with a President in a hurry, who seems to cut every corner and half-ass every task, only to be left with a bigger mess than he started with when the bodge job doesn’t work. Trump’s half-assed political legacy is becoming impossible for even his supporters to ignore. The Maga coalition is fracturing as the midterms draw nearer and the search for his successor begins. People living in Trump’s buildings must surely be hoping he was more careful as a construction boss than he has been as a politician.