Saturday, November 07, 2026
Friday, November 06, 2026
Trump signs proclamation to try to prevent changes to gold-covered Oval Office
Trump signs proclamation to try to prevent changes to gold-covered Oval Office
“The article describes President Trump's proclamation to protect the design of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. The proclamation aims to prevent future administrations from making changes to the rooms. The article also mentions Trump's previous renovation projects at the White House, including the demolition of the East Wing and the construction of a permanent granite helipad.
President seeks to make Oval Office a national monument to ensure designs are not ‘ripped down by stupid people’
Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Thursday that he says will prevent future administrations from changing his design of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, spaces which he declared as national monuments that should be preserved.
In the days since his party suffered historic defeats in the midterm elections, the president has seemingly turned his attention to the many renovation projects he has begun across the nation’s capital. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Trump declared the Oval Office a “national monument”.
“I’m going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages,” he told reporters in the gold-covered Oval Office.
According to the president, the proclamation would ensure the West Wing rooms would not be “touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape”.
“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 said.
“Every once in a while they’ll look and they’ll say, oh, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll put some glass up that’s a little bit better or something, and I say no, you’re not going to do anything. We’re going to leave this as it is,” he continued.
“If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you’ll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here and I will make sure it never happens.”
Since returning to office, Trump has embarked on a series of White House “beautification” projects, most notably the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a $600m ballroom, as well the building of a permanent granite helipad on the South Lawn.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, the president defended his wider renovation work at the White House, saying the building’s exterior had suffered from years of deterioration. He pointed to cracked windows, damaged stonework and broken decorative features, saying he had paid for repairs and hired skilled workers to restore them.
“When you looked at that wall one year ago, it was badly damaged from years of service,” he said, adding that exterior columns had also been in “horrible shape”.
On the desk next to where he signed the proclamation was a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto” – an explicit reminder of his threat to block the legislative priorities and bills passed by the new Democratic-controlled Congress next year.
Democrats made significant gains in several traditionally Republican states where Trump had previously won, including Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and Iowa, by campaigning on issues including affordability and tackling corruption, while also securing control of Congress.
Trump’s opulent redesign of the Oval Office has drawn criticism, including from former president Barack Obama, who recently joked that “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”
Obama’s remark prompted a coordinated response from the White House, with treasury secretary Scott Bessent appearing to hit back by dining at a Cheesecake Factory.
In a final appeal ahead of the midterm elections, Trump held a press conference highlighting the delayed results of his $14m renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, while blaming Joe Biden for the algae that had accumulated in its waters.
“This was in the Biden era … Look, it’s not an easy thing. The algae is brutal. It forms easily. All you saw was dirt and filth and paper and everything else for years,” Trump said on Monday.
Two days later, as the scale of his party’s staggering losses came into focus, Trump led a media tour of the White House Ballroom construction site, where he marveled at the renovations to come.
“The whole thing is a miracle,” he said.“
JD Vance Is Probably Toast
JD Vance Is Probably Toast
“JD Vance faces a weakened path to the presidency after midterm losses tied to the Iran war and inflation. His alignment with Trump and Silicon Valley ties may hinder him, despite Trump’s favor and Vance’s resourcefulness.
By Matthew Schmitz
Mr. Schmitz is the editor of the magazine Compact and a host of the politics and culture podcast “Counterculture.”
His name may not have been on the ballot, but the biggest loser of the midterms was Vice President JD Vance. President Trump will never face voters again. Mr. Vance, by contrast, doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring public opinion. If he hopes to win the presidency in 2028, he will need to sell voters on the tarnished Trump brand.
Republicans such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are already distancing themselves from the Trump presidency. On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis characterized the election results as “a rejection of Republicans in Washington.”
Mr. Vance will have a harder time putting daylight between himself and an unpopular president. Many Republicans have expressed fealty to Mr. Trump, but Mr. Vance has gone further. In both style and substance, he has presented himself as an avatar of the MAGA movement, more Trumpist than Mr. Trump. He has not only served as vice president but has also grown close with Mr. Trump’s family, particularly Donald Trump Jr. To a far greater extent than, say, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Vance is Mr. Trump’s man.
On Wednesday, Mr. Vance issued a carefully argued statement on X in response to the midterm losses, which he attributed to frustration over the Iran war and inflation, combined with a desire to put America first and change the country’s relationship with Israel. He was at pains not to appear at odds with the president. When he wrote that “the reason we lost is the war,” he was quick to add that “the president himself said so last night.” And Donald Trump Jr. reposted the statement approvingly (“Every word of this is 100, 100, 100”).
Notably, Mr. Vance’s statement made no mention of tariffs, which increased costs even before the price of gas was driven up by the war. His silence is not surprising. Mr. Vance’s political story centers on his connection to a working class left behind by globalization. He cannot change his tune on trade without betraying his political identity.
On Iran, Mr. Vance has no good options. He argued against the venture in internal deliberations but, having lost the argument, backed the war in public. Now he has to convince voters to give him credit for privately opposing the same war he was publicly defending. That dog won’t hunt, unless he breaks with Mr. Trump in a more forceful and dramatic way.
Publicly crossing the president would be risky, though, given that Mr. Vance has already changed his tune on Mr. Trump once, going from staunch critic in 2016 to vocal supporter in 2021. Another reversal would seem all too politically expedient. A hard break with Mr. Trump would also be risky given the president’s support among Republicans. Though his backing has declined among independents, 82 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing.
As for changing America’s relationship with Israel, that is a pseudo-populist nothingburger. It won’t improve the life of a single Trump voter (most of the money “sent” to the country is spent in the United States) or eliminate the reasons the United States projects power globally. But cutting Israel loose is a lot easier to do than imposing tariffs and closing the border while keeping prices low.
Mr. Vance’s postmortem on Wednesday said nothing about corruption. No wonder. Mr. Trump promised to drain the swamp but instead permitted an algae bloom. Rank money-grubbing has surrounded the administration, making Hunter Biden’s attempts at self-enrichment look amateur. Democrats will do everything they can to expose these tawdry dealings through congressional investigations and hearings. Many of Mr. Vance’s closest allies, including Donald Trump Jr., will be subject to scrutiny. However spotless Mr. Vance’s own conduct has been, the dirt will rub off on him.
Mr. Vance retains important advantages. He has Mr. Trump’s favor, has raised money for countless Republican candidates and has successfully courted important parts of the right. But Mr. Vance’s wealthy connections may prove a liability. Populists on the left like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will eagerly tie Mr. Vance to Silicon Valley’s abysmally unpopular artificial-intelligence-fueled visions of a post-human society. Mr. DeSantis, who has gone after A.I. companies, may be prepared to do the same. And across the country this year, voters rejected candidates with close ties to the tech titans of Silicon Valley; even accepting a donation from someone like Elon Musk, for some politicians, seems to have backfired.
Likewise, the sectors of the right courted by Mr. Vance seem increasingly unhinged. Tucker Carlson, a longtime Vance ally and once a unifying MAGA voice, now devotes much of his time to promoting bizarre theories about Jews and Israel. Ten years ago, it seemed that populism might mean reshoring American manufacturing, securing the border, advancing a more modest foreign policy and resisting elite cultural priorities. But for many, it now means nothing more than denouncing a far-off country.
Mr. Vance is resourceful and shrewd. He made his way from the Rust Belt to Yale Law, and from saying Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to serving as his vice president. Perhaps he can complete another unlikely journey, to the presidency. But he now seems farther from that office than he did just one week ago.“
Hungry for Change, L.A. Voters Choose Nithya Raman as the Next Mayor
Hungry for Change, L.A. Voters Choose Nithya Raman as the Next Mayor
“Nithya Raman defeated Karen Bass to become Los Angeles mayor, winning 52 percent of the vote. The democratic socialist prioritized homelessness, housing, and public safety, promising to replace the police chief. Bass conceded, pledging a smooth transition.
The 45-year-old City Council member defeated the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, 73, a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders.
Nithya Raman, a 45-year-old democratic socialist who tapped into a widespread frustration with the quality of life in the nation’s second-largest city, will become the new mayor of Los Angeles, The Associated Pressreported Thursday.
Her victory over Karen Bass, the 73-year-old incumbent, is a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders and the arrival of younger Angelenos as a political force in the sprawling metropolis.
A Harvard-educated policy expert who served six years on the City Council, Ms. Raman turned the page on a liberal bastion whose leaders had been consumed with big-picture battles with the Trump administration. Instead, she zoomed in on the nuts-and-bolts distress of young voters who increasingly found themselves priced out of the famously expensive city. Polls consistently showed her ahead by a wide margin with voters under 35.
The vote also revealed a broad appetite for change among the four million residents of the city — an echo of calls for a fresh perspective that on Tuesday night propelled a Democratic wave from Maine to California. In Los Angeles, which is already deep blue, it also suggested a widespread openness to the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist movement that helped elect New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
By Thursday, Ms. Raman was leading with 52 percent of the vote and D.S.A.-backed candidates had won races for city attorney and Congress. Members of the movement already hold three seats on the 15-member City Council. Ms. Bass called Ms. Raman, her one-time ally, to concede on Thursday morning as the ongoing vote count showed a widening lead for Ms. Raman.
“I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” the mayor said in a statement. “Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.”
On Thursday evening, Ms. Raman, who until recently was little known outside of progressive political circles, spoke to reporters at a farmers market in the Fairfax District, surrounded by throngs of news cameras, supporters and onlooking shoppers. She wore a blood-orange leather jacket and seemed to pause in front of the microphones, as if taking in her first moments before the public as mayor-elect.
“The key priorities that we’ve heard across this entire city are homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” Ms. Raman said, adding, “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.”
She sought to reassure those who voted for her opponent or opted to not participate in the election. “I think that’s a sign of the deep distrust and cynicism that has taken hold here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said. “My goal is to earn your trust.”
Ms. Raman, an immigrant from India with a screenwriter husband and two children, said her story of becoming mayor was emblematic of the opportunity the city represented to the rest of the world. “This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here,” she said. “And the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor, at this moment in American history, is so deeply moving to me.”
Preliminary election results showed that Ms. Raman had amassed support on the city’s gentrifying Eastside and in neighborhoods dense with young people, newcomers and renters. Ms. Bass drew from homeowners on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley and historically Black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles.
In one largely Latino neighborhood — Boyle Heights — where a cold storage warehouse fire burned for days in June, filling the air with the stench of rotten meat and seafood, voters who had backed Ms. Bass during the primary election flipped and supported Ms. Raman by large margins in the general election vote.
In interviews this week, voters said they welcomed Ms. Raman’s return to basics. Anthony Nabea, 36, said that he liked her focus on city services and potholes. Marisol Medina, 52, disapproved of the money Ms. Bass had spent on the police, whose union was among her primary supporters.
Zanisha Butler, 33, said she was simply ready for a new face in the mayor’s office. “I feel like Karen Bass has run her course to be honest,” Ms. Butler said.
Others expressed concern over the loss by Ms. Bass, whom they viewed as a steady hand compared to the relatively untested Ms. Raman. Daquan Houston, 42, a truck driver in the South Los Angeles of Vermont Square, said the mayor deserved a chance to finish the work she had started.
“If you get someone new,” he said, “then they’re going to be starting from scratch.”
Overall, however, Zev Yaroslavsky, the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime civic leader, said Ms. Raman’s victory was “a reflection of an electorate that feels the city is on the wrong track.”
An annual survey conducted early this year by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., found that residents across the county were less satisfied with their quality of life than at any point in more than a decade.
Few members of the civic establishment publicly backed Ms. Raman. But those who did cited pragmatic motives.
George Kieffer, a former chair of the University of California board of regents and a principal coauthor of the Los Angeles City Charter, said that at 78, he had decided that only a major political shake-up would wake the city bureaucracy out of its lethargy.
“My party’s establishment is caught in its own bubble,” he said. “Nithya sees it. When she jumped, I did.”
A physician assistant and native Angeleno who organized in South Los Angeles against the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ms. Bass rose politically as a progressive outside the city’s establishment circles. When she was elected mayor in 2022 , as the city strained to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, she defeated Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and civic leader who spent $100 million of his own money on the campaign.
But her fortunes turned in January 2025. Traveling to Africa at the behest of the Biden administration, she was out of the country when devastating wildfires erupted.
The disaster all but leveled the star-studded Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades, and many survivors never forgave her for being absent during a time of crisis. Her campaign for re-election was an uphill battle from then on.
Six months after the fire, a violent crackdown on immigrants in Los Angeles by the Trump administration set off protests that the White House then seized upon to deploy some 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines into Southern California. Throughout the occupation, which lasted until the end of the year, the Republican president and his allies clashed withMs. Bass.
The partisan tension shored up her support, but not enough to fend off a serious challenge. After Austin Beutner, a civic leader from Pacific Palisades, entered the race and then withdrew in the wake of a family tragedy, Ms. Raman jumped in.
Ms. Raman, a specialist in urban planning who had been elected to the City Council in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, channeled both Mr. Mamdani and San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, Daniel Lurie. Los Angeles was “broken,” she charged, and Mayor Bass had fallen short on ensuring a basic quality of life.
Although Ms. Raman at times stumbled on camera, and had to scramble to clarify her missteps, her campaign also shrewdly deployed social media videos designed to reach younger voters. Following in the footsteps of Mr. Mamdani, she gamely appeared in spoofs of microdramas made by real Hollywood production crews and election-themed skits with D.S.A.-aligned actors and influencers. In one video, she talked about creating more shade in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, while pretending to be burned by hot surfaces — a car door, a picnic bench.
She also distanced herself in some ways from the D.S.A., supporting changes to a local “mansion tax,” for instance, that would have benefited one of the D.S.A.’s usual targets: apartment owners. But she pledged to replace the police chief, whose aggressive crowd-control tactics during immigration protests were denounced by the D.S.A. The group also accused the Police Department of protecting federal agents.
Ms. Bass seized on Ms. Raman’s promise, calling it reckless with the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and charged that her challenger was “untested” and “not ready for prime time.” Ms. Bass’s 2022 opponent, Mr. Caruso, came to her aid, urging voters to reject Ms. Raman and the D.S.A. Every member of the City Council expressed support of Ms. Bass, except for Ms. Raman.
None of it was enough. After a hedge fund manager and advocate for increased bicycle use in the car-crazy city, backed Ms. Raman, becoming the race’s largest donor, Ms. Raman began airing ads on Dodger games and national news shows.
As her victory became clear, lobbyists, unions, downtown businesses, nonprofits and other entrenched civic interests were already preparing for a realignment. The pressure will be on the mayor-elect, according to Mr. Yaroslavsky at U.C.L.A.
Ms. Raman, he said, “now must face the challenge of erecting a new administration and beginning to fulfill her promise to fix the city she will lead in six short weeks.”
Vik Jolly contributed reporting.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
Orlando MayorquÃn is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.“
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