Showers Of Gold: How Weakness Glitters

From Versailles on the Potomac to the People’s Palace, authoritarians shine brightest before the fall

As someone who grew up just outside Washington DC with a single mom who worked for the government her whole career, what Donald Trump is doing to the White House is offensive on a deep level. The White House is our house, We The People, not his. He gets to live there, temporarily. Nevertheless, he is turning one of the most historic and important buildings in the world into Saddam’s Palace with a dance club and a discount mall food court.

Late-stage Saddam with a food court and a dance club

However, this isn’t just about his disgraceful taste, or even the fact that it signals right up front, “Hey look! I’m a strongman!” it’s about the psychology of weakness and collapse.

To show just how deeply embedded gold is in Trump’s head, on Thursday, when Tim Cook needed a tariff exemption worth billions, he made a pilgrimage to the White House with a literal gold bar—which you are free to call a gift, or a bribe.

A Brief History of Golden Narcissism

Gold has been used over millennia as a sign of authority and power, and it is not only used by despots and dictators. Buckingham Palace, for example, has no shortage of gilded embellishments. But what do almost all governments that use gold as an aesthetic have in common? They’re monarchies where the physical possession of a metal that the commoners couldn’t have was historically not seen as a sign of greed, but as a sign of divinity.

As a small reminder of others who garishly used gold as a sign of their omnipotence and power:

• Saddam Hussein built much of his visual iconography using gold as the theme. He slathered gold leaf on everything, especially in his 99 palaces.

  

  Saddam’s gold chair, gold-leaf pillars, Marine with some of Saddam’s gold.

• Muammar Gaddafi hoarded and stole untold billions of gold and diamonds, and as his regime toppled managed to ship a fifth of Libya’s gold… somewhere. It still hasn’t been found—which is quite a story. Gaddafi, like the rest, lived in golden palaces, wore golden clothes, and gilded his possessions, and surroundings.

  

  Gaddafi’s golden clothes, gun and palace

• Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu built one of the most astonishing monuments to the dangers of malignant narcissism ever seen, the People’s Palace, which was never officially opened because Ceausescu was overthrown, and like Saddam and Gaddafi, met his end running away from his own people.

  

  Ceausescu’s People’s Palace

• Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s designated puppet in Ukraine—and 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s former employer—built a massive palace in Mezhyhirya for himself, which featured not just a golden toilet like the others but a 2-kilo golden bread loaf.

• Jeffrey Epstein used gold not just to project wealth and power, but as a tool of seduction and control through environment.

  

  Epstein’s mansion

Donald Trump’s 88-foot flagpoles, his giant $200 million ballroom, and his obsession with turning the White House into a gilded palace is a sign of a man who wants to turn the United States into a monarchy.

Architectural Narcissism

It is the nature of a malignant narcissist to shape the world around them to project an image of power and dominance. But when that projection becomes real, it leads to an internal psychological mandate to project an even more powerful and dominant image—and the cycle repeats. That’s why they are so dangerous. They never stop hoarding. They simply can’t.

But when the narcissist is wounded and their image begins to dim—that’s when they act out and double down. Gilding your environment can be seen as psychological camouflage for a narcissist, hoping to distract from the weakness of the real person inside with glittering signs of opulence and power. And when that weakness takes over and leads to narcissistic collapse, the glitter of the environment gets brighter and brighter. This is when they are must vulnerable.

Dictators build palaces when their power falters, not in spite of the poverty and destitution that always accompanies their reigns, but because of it. The more the people suffer, the more glitter they need to cover it up. The more the leader collapses, the more gilded they have to get.

Gilded Rage

Donald Trump and his sycophants exhaustingly brag about a new “Golden Age” for America, and often reference the time period of America’s Gilded Age as a reason citizens should be so excited about it. But it’s, in reality, what the kids call a self-own.

Mark Twain, with co-author Charles Dudley Warner, coined the term “The Gilded Age” in their 1873 satirical novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” The term gilded was meant as a deliberate shot at the robber barons, tycoons, and wild corruption of the time, a thin veneer of opulence hiding a far less noble core.

But it is just that kind of lawless, rapacious America that Trump and his co-conspirators are looking for, a nation suffering from a fractured soul, while a tiny few profit from our discontent. He’s not just adopting the aesthetic, he’s embracing Twain’s insult as a virtue.

Peeling Back the Gold Leaf

Donald Trump and the billionaires who support him are the gold leaf covering over an increasingly abused and neglected nation—a handful of people who are attempting to turn America into a monarchy under our nose, enforced through violence, surveillance, psychological warfare, and the glitter of gold.

However, this is not Reconstruction, or 18th century France—it is a vast, interconnected nation, a democratic superpower with incredible resources and a population at near full employment. You can’t turn that into a monarchy with a can of gold spray paint in a few years. Nevertheless, the Trump regime is trying, and we need to resist it—by any means possible.

The easiest, and most fun way, is to mock it. As I’ve written, mockery is a perfectly valid and patriotic form of resistance. It doesn’t work one on one, but outward, public signs of defiance or non-compliance are healthy and important.

But Trump’s obsession with gold and turning the White House into Saddam’s Palace is also a very inviting target for anyone who might want to resist a little harder. The outward signs of his garish opulence contrasted with the actual reality of Americans on Main Street can be weaponized in the form of cognitive dissonance.

Trump is trying to mask his own weakness and failure with shiny objects. To defeat this, you have to separate them and show them side by side. For example, when Trump promotes “savings” from Medicaid cuts from his gilded office while getting golden trophies from other billionaires, or boasts about his ballroom while taking away Big Bird, it’s an opportunity to disrupt the loop by showing the trade-off in stark, personal terms, whether it’s one-on-one or social media.

• “My dialysis for your dance floor.”

• “My kid’s lunch for your golden toilet.”

You want to force MAGA to hold two thoughts in their head at once:

• Trump is my champion

• Trump is taking my money to gild his palace

This kind of mental whiplash is very difficult to ignore, and to unsee.

There is a deep strain of anti-establishment sentiment among most MAGA / QAnon believers. It’s part of what attracted them to Donald Trump in the first place, but as he continues to deteriorate and proves that he is not just part of the establishment but wants to make it permanent and involuntary, we may see a different kind of “Great Awakening.”

As part of the remaining free-thinking population, dear reader, our job is to keep causing cognitive dissonance in his followers, to erode the bonds that tie them down—view by view, chat by chat, and one post at a time. There is an old saying: to “gild the lily”—which means to try to embellish something that’s already beautiful with something tacky. In this metaphor, America is the lily and Donald Trump is the spray paint. Spray paint never lasts—it either wears off or scrubs off. It’s up to us which comes first.

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