Who’s the boss? Trump retreats into renovations as Melania takes on Ukraine diplomacy

The day before his party lost close to 50 seats in the House and Senate plus countless governorships and state legislative seats in what has now been labeled a “blue tsunami,” President Donald Trump spent most of his closing argument speech boasting about renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.The day after an election that served as a resounding referendum on his failures as president, he spent nearly an hour holding forth with the White House press pool in front of a steel beam for a "topping out" ceremony to mark the end of construction for his massive White House ballroom's steel frame.Standing in the cavernous space where once the East Wing of the White House stood — before he unilaterally and, according to a court ruling, illegally had it torn down — he told reporters to "envision chandeliers" and "envision marble flooring" that will one day be there."This will be the most beautiful building," Trump promised.The president's calendar this week included one other public event focused on his various renovations and other vanity projects — a hastily-arranged signing ceremony for a proclamation purporting to block future presidents from ripping down the gaudy Louis XIV-inspired decor he has plastered all over the Oval Office.Melania appears to be getting serious just when her husband seems to have shed presidential affairs for less weighty Oval Office decor preservation, ballroom tours and pool maintenance (AFP via Getty Images)"I'm going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages," he said, adding later that the proclamation would, in his estimation, keep the over-the-top decor he has placed in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room from being "touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people.""I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come and take it down and try and do something with it," he added, no doubt spurred to action by former President Barack Obama’s cutting barb in the waning days of the midterm elections campaign that Trump has made the Oval Office look ‘like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory’.Trump's singular obsession with his various and sundry beautification projects has, according to White House insiders, almost completely consumed his focus for weeks now, even as he was crisscrossing the country in a failed attempt to drum up support from his MAGA base and stave off what became a historic drubbing for his party this past week.There is a name for the job he has given himself, and it is not “President of the United States.”Decorating the Executive Mansion, selecting its china and its flowers, tending its gardens and its grass, planning its social calendar and presiding over its entertaining spaces — these are, by long and largely gendered tradition, the duties of the first lady of the United States. They are the soft, ceremonial, aesthetic functions that American political culture has always filed as work run out of the (now demolished) East Wing, left up to a president's spouse and her staff while he handled the hard business of governing.But with his party having taken a massive rout and his approval rating hovering around 30 percent with two years left in his term, Trump appears to have taken refuge from the political tumult in the first lady’s portfolio.President Donald Trump speaks Thursday, after signing a proclamation on the 'Establishment of the Oval Office National Monument' (Reuters)He has opinions on the shade of blue in the now twice painted Reflecting Pool — "American flag blue," very dark, he explained at length, because a lighter color "wouldn't have any reflecting." He has had the grass in front of the White House replaced, courtesy of a donated job from the Scotts lawn company after the UFC fight he commissioned for the South Lawn destroyed it, and speaks about it the way a first lady might once have spoken about the Rose Garden — which, by the way, he had paved over in favor of a Mar-a-Lago style patio early on in 2025. He has catalogued the 83 statues and fountains his administration has cleaned, the lighting fixtures it has fixed, the graffiti it has scrubbed. And he has spent the better part of a year building a 90,000-square-foot ballroom in which to host — the single most first-lady function there is.To build it, he tore down the East Wing. The literal, physical offices of the first lady of the United States were demolished to make room for the president's entertaining space.And while he has been doing all of this, his wife has been doing something else entirely. She has been working on diplomacy.Melania Trump spent this week not arranging flowers but hosting senior Russian and Ukrainian officials at the White House to mark a ceasefire her office says she personally brokered. Russian special envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitrievon presents first lady Melania Trump a child's drawing during an event on a temporary Russia-Ukraine ceasefire at the White House on Nov. 5 (Getty)The truce, in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, halts fighting long enough to evacuate civilians through a humanitarian corridor and the White House described the first lady as its "exclusive intermediary” while crediting her with helping negotiate the temporary accord. It followed more than a year of back-channel work that began when she sent Vladimir Putin a letter — hand-delivered by her husband at his August 2025 summit with the Russian leader in Alaska — and opened what she has called an "open channel of communication" with the Russian president over children displaced by the war. Her office credits that channel with reuniting 34 children with their families. And in March, she even took the president's own seat at a United Nations Security Council meeting on children in conflict, the first spouse of a world leader ever to do so.Kirill Dmitriev, one of Putin's top envoys, praised her "crucial leadership role."The contrast with her husband's record on the same war is not subtle. Trump has spent the better part of two years promising to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, at times within 24 hours, and has not. He told a rally in Florida last week that he was "close to ending, I hope, the Russia-Ukraine catastrophe." His wife, in the meantime, produced an actual signed agreement, however small.Asked whether his wife would join the formal trilateral peace talks he has pushed for between Russia and Ukraine — talks that have yet to materialize despite his best efforts — Trump said she would not. "What she wants to do is save children," he said. "That's her focus."Still, the division of labor in the wake of Trump’s midterm defeat is more than a bit jarring, with the first lady negotiating with a nuclear-armed adversary while the president all but measures the drapes. None of this is to say the renovations are trivial to him — multiple aides who have spoken to The Independent in recent weeks say they are what occupies his mind the vast majority of waking hours. In the week his coalition collapsed at the ballot box, the projects were where Trump chose to be seen — in front of the steel beam, in front of the pool, signing a proclamation to protect his gold Oval Office trim "for the ages." He can’t change the outcome of the election, but he can keep pressing on with building things he believes will help him be well-remembered by history.And so he has retreated into the one part of the job where the work is visible, the critics can be called vandals, and the finished product can be photographed and admired. He told the country to envision chandeliers. He did not have much to say about the election.