Donald Trump stands 15 feet tall at his Doral golf course in Miami, a bronze giant coated in shimmering gold leaf. A cryptocurrency group spent $360,000 on the tribute, which depicts the President with a triumphant fist raised toward the Florida sun. The statue arrived just in time for the Cadillac Championship, greeting 37 of the top 50 players in the world. "Obviously, this course here is very grainy, so you're going to see golf being played a little bit different this week," observed one spectator as the 15-foot monument dominated the skyline.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the President is trading gold leaf for granite scrubs. Trump announced a $1.5 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a task he claims the Biden administration wanted $300 million to complete. He called up three contractors he knew—men he described as "unbelievable at doing swimming pools"—to get the job done in two weeks. Trump promised the result would be "much more beautiful than when they did it in 1922."

The aesthetic overhaul extends to the Kennedy Center, which Trump has labeled "tired, broken, and dilapidated." Matt Floca, the venue's new executive director, guided journalists through the building as $257 million in Congressional funding prepares to shutter the site for two years. Between a new ballroom at the White House and a proposed triumphal arch near Arlington, the President is hollowing out the old city to make room for his own neoclassical monuments.

Read together, these projects suggest a leader more interested in the polish of the pool and the shine of the statue than the structural integrity of the agencies within. This paper's reading of the renovation is clear: the state is being treated as a fixer-upper for a man who builds more than 100 swimming pools. While the Kennedy Center prepares for its two-year slumber, the gold at Doral remains polished and ready for the cameras.