President Donald Trump’s love for gold dates all the way back to his first marriage, a new book has revealed.
The 80-year-old president’s gold craze was heavily influenced by his first wife, Ivana, White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Ivana, who died in 2022, was vice president of interior design at the Trump Organization for years. She played a key role in designing the firm’s glitziest properties, including the Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.
“Trump’s first wife, Ivana, the vice president of interior design at his company, had had a penchant for gilding everything,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “It was Ivana who was said to have first encouraged the gold obsession that soon became a hallmark of her husband’s properties.”
The gaudy style that has become a signature of Trump actually started out as Ivana’s own obsession with everything gold.
Her motto became, “If something could be leafed in gold or upholstered in damask, it was,” according to The Guardian.
After she obtained her interior designer’s license, Ivana would spend up to ten hours a day at the site for the Grand Hyatt Hotel, calling the shots “over every pillow, every table and chair, and every brass column,” she told Vanity Fair in 1988.
“I would send over one of my executives, or more often my wife, just to see how things were going,” Trump said at the time.
“Donald calls me his twin as a woman,” Ivana said, “except in one sense: I’m not a promoter—I can’t talk my way around things the way a promoter does. I’m straightforward.”
The two were married for 15 years and share three children: Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. Ivana died at age 73 after suffering injuries from a fall.
But her taste for gold lives on at the White House, which has been gilded from top to bottom by Trump.
Though Trump managed to maintain the tradition of a muted Oval Office in his first term, he has gone all out in his second, even personally super-gluing gilded appliqués to the wall to match his gold molding, gold-framed paintings, and gold cherubs.
“As he was known to prefer his own aesthetic handiwork to anyone else’s, the sight of the president squeezing glue onto gilded appliqués and mounting them on the wall himself surprised no one in his inner circle,” Haberman and Swan wrote.
“When Trump asked White House residence staff what they thought of the glittering display, most responses were muted, but his devout aide Natalie Harp would gush with delight,” they added.
The idea of designing the White House had crossed Ivana’s mind, too, as early as 1988, even as she said “definitely not” to the idea of becoming first lady.
“There is so much to do. We have invested in this town close to a billion dollars. We can’t just put it in escrow and go to the White House. It would go down the drain in a second,” she told Vanity Fair at the time.
“It’s too young, too new. But in ten years, Donald is going to be just fifty-one years old—a young man. What he’s done in the last ten years some corporations don’t do in a hundred years. Donald is interested in politics at a certain level. But I don’t think he would run for mayor—he could do that so easily. That wouldn’t be a challenge for him.”
