'Incapable of caring': Anger as Trump brags about marble bathroom re-do during shutdown

As millions of families across the US are about to lose their access to food aid over the weekend, President Donald Trump on Friday decided to show off photos of a White House bathroom that he boasted had been refurbished in “highly polished, statuary marble.”

Trump posted photos of the bathroom on his Truth Social platform, and he explained that he decided to remodel it because he was dissatisfied with the “art deco green tile style” that had been implemented during a previous renovation, which he described as “totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.”“I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble,” Trump continued. “This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”

Trump’s critics were quick to pan the remodeled bathroom, especially since it came at a time when Americans are suffering from numerous policies the president and the Republican Party are enacting, including tariffs that are raising the cost of food and clothing; expiring subsidies for Americans who buy health insurance through Affordable Care Act exchanges; and cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Sure, you might not be able to eat or go to the doctor, but check out how nice Trump’s new marble shitter is,” remarked independent journalist Aaron Rupar on Bluesky.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who has become a critic of Trump, ripped the president for displaying such tone deafness in the middle of a federal government shutdown.

“Government still shutdown, Americans not getting paid, food assistance for low-income families and children about to be cut off, and this is what he cares about,” he wrote on X. “He’s a psychopath, humanly incapable of caring about anyone or anything but himself.”

Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, expressed extreme skepticism that the White House bathroom during Abraham Lincoln’s tenure was decked out in marble and gold.

“Fact check based on no research but with a high degree of confidence: This is not the marble that was originally in the Lincoln Bedroom,” he wrote. “It is more likely to the be retrieved from a Trump casino before it was demolished.”

Fashion critic Derek Guy, meanwhile, mostly left politics out of his criticisms of the remodeled bathroom, instead simply observing that “White House renovations are currently being spearheaded by someone with famously bad interior design taste.”

Earlier this month, Trump sparked outrage when he demolished the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a massive White House ballroom financed by donations from some of America’s wealthiest corporations—including several with government contracts and interests in deregulation—such as Apple, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir.