In 2025, President Donald Trump's makeover of the White House has taken on two different forms: (1) tearing down the historic East Wing to make way for a lavish new ballroom, and (2) redecorating parts of the West Wing in a distinctly Trumpian fashion.

The New York Times' Sam Sifton, in a newsletter published on Christmas Eve Day 2025, describes Trump's Oval Office makeover — which, the reporter notes, is so extensive that "he's almost out of wall space."

"He has made it an extravagant room," Sifton observes. "Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls…. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk."

Sifton's newsletter is accompanied by two photos from the Times' Doug Mills — one showing Joe Biden in the Oval Office during his presidency, the other showing the Oval Office since Trump's return to the White House. And the latter has a lot more gold, which Sifton notes, is "a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times, "He's a maximalist."

Some Trump critics, however, are alleging that the gold in the Oval Office may not be real gold.

Sifton explains, "All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they're just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends."

Read Sam Sifton's full New York Times newsletter is available at this link (subscription required).

Appearing on Piers Morgan today, longtime Trump supporter and former administration appointee Carrie Prejean Boller had some harsh words for the president and his movement, declaring MAGA “deader than dead.” She arrived at this opinion, she explained, due to Trump’s willingness to follow Israel into war against Iran.

“I think that a foreign country has occupied our government, and we are seeing now that this president of the United States of America is being influenced by a foreign government,” she said. “And MAGA, let me tell you right now, MAGA is dead. It is deader than dead, and Americans are furious. We don’t recognize President Donald J. Trump anymore.”

Boller’s assertion comes in a moment when the MAGA movement appears more fractured than ever.

The war in Iran and Israel’s involvement has brought some stunning defections, including today’s resignation of the Trump-appointed counterterrorism official Joe Kent. Beyond that, Trump’s actions on Iran have drawn condemnation from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and even Vice President JD Vance has expressed skepticism.

Iran hasn’t been the only sticking point for MAGA infighting. Many have been dismayed by the administration’s handling of the Epstein Files, which pushed longtime Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene to resign from Congress. She is now a vocal opponent to the war, telling CNN, “The American people did not vote for this. I went to, I can’t even tell you, countless rallies all over the country for President Trump, campaigning for him and Republicans because we wanted to win, and we said on every single rally stage, ‘No more foreign wars, no more regime change’.”

Others who became drawn into the MAGA movement via its MAHA counterpart have been disappointed by the administration’s embrace of herbicides, while younger MAGA voters have been turned off by the increasingly “cringe” behavior of its leadership, from the overelaborate plastic surgery of “Mar-a-Lago face,” to using SpongeBob Squarepants clips to promote the war with Iran, to the alternative Superbowl halftime show featuring a lip-syncing Kid Rock.

Criticism from Boller and other disappointed MAGA figures comes as Trump’s poll numbers continue to trend downward. Currently he holds net positive approval in only a handful of states, and he’s far underwater even in many that elected him by large pluralities, suggesting that his diminishing popularity is eating into what was presumed to be his most loyal base. And his blatantly unpopular war is not helping his numbers.

“I talk to MAGA people all day long, every day,” said Boller. “And the everyday, average American is absolutely against this war.”

A report published Wednesday by Greenpeace exposes the plastics industry as “merchants of myth” still peddling the false promise of recycling as a solution to the global pollution crisis, even as the vast bulk of commonly produced plastics remain unrecyclable.

“After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.

“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of plastic waste and pollution.”

Among the report’s findings:

• Only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are actually recyclable;
• Major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly retracting sustainability commitments while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
• The US plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and reduce public backlash.

“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrative emanating from the White House,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”

“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.

Greenpeace is among the many climate and environmental groups supporting a global plastics treaty, an accord that remains elusive after six rounds of talks due to opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that produce the petroleum products from which almost all plastics are made.

Honed from decades of funding and promoting dubious research aimed at casting doubts about the climate crisis caused by its products, the petrochemical industry has sent a small army of lobbyists to influence global treaty negotiations.

In addition to environmental and climate harms, plastics—whose chemicals often leach into the food and water people eat and drink—are linked to a wide range of health risks, including infertility, developmental issues, metabolic disorders, and certain cancers.

Plastics also break down into tiny particles found almost everywhere on Earth—including in human bodies—called microplastics, which cause ailments such as inflammation, immune dysfunction, and possibly cardiovascular disease and gut biome imbalance.

A study published earlier this year in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that plastics are responsible for more than $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses worldwide annually—impacts that disproportionately affect low-income and at-risk populations.

As Jo Banner, executive director of the Descendants Project—a Louisiana advocacy group dedicated to fighting environmental racism in frontline communities—said in response to the new Greenpeace report, “It’s the same story everywhere: poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities turned into sacrifice zones so oil companies and big brands can keep making money.”

“They call it development—but it’s exploitation, plain and simple,” Banner added. “There’s nothing acceptable about poisoning our air, water, and food to sell more throwaway plastic. Our communities are not sacrifice zones, and we are not disposable people.”

Writing for Time this week, Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency and current president of the environmental justice group Beyond Plastics, said that “throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your guilt about your climate impact. But recycling plastic will not address the plastic pollution crisis—and it is time we stop pretending as such.”

“So what can we do?” Enck continued. “First, companies need to stop producing so much plastic and shift to reusable and refillable systems. If reducing packaging or using reusable packaging is not possible, companies should at least shift to paper, cardboard, glass, or metal.”

“Companies are not going to do this on their own, which is why policymakers—the officials we elected to protect us—need to require them to do so,” she added.

Although lawmakers in the 119th US Congress have introduced a handful of bills aimed at tackling plastic pollution, such proposals are all but sure to fail given Republican control of both the House of Representatives and Senate and the Trump administration’s pro-petroleum policies.

Veteran economics reporter Catherine Rampell warns of “Warflation” in the weeks ahead.

In a post to The Bulwark, Rampell predicted higher prices are on the horizon for “anything that needs to be transported anywhere.”

“The top crude oil expert at S&P Global Energy warned that the military conflict has the potential to become 'the largest oil supply disruption in history,'" she writes. "That’s because about a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, on Iran’s southern coast.”

Oil prices are already skyrocketing, a reversal of a previous bright spot in affordability.

“But since we bombed Iran, energy costs have risen sharply. To put things in perspective: oil prices are up about 20 percent so far just this week," Rampell adds.

The downstream effect on various pricing issues will soon follow.

“Downstream firms that require [liquefied natural gas] to operate are closing shop, too. For example, the Gulf region is responsible for nearly a tenth of the global aluminum supply," according to Rampell. "Already this week, multiple major aluminum smelters had to initiate shutdowns; one company says it may take up to a year to restart production.”

Adding to the cascade are methanol and other chemicals, including fertilizers used to grow food supplies. “American farmers are freaking out,” Rampell claims, and buttressed the point by talking to an analyst.

Consumers may see “higher prices for bread within six to 10 weeks, eggs within a few months and pork and broiler chicken within six months,” according to an estimate from food-system expert Raj Patel.

Those are the obvious targets. But on the horizon are other products that will soon feel the effect of chemical price hikes.

Rampell writes, “Then there are the gazillions of consumer goods that people may not realize use petrochemicals as inputs. Those include clothes, iPhones, candy, dentures, dishwashing liquid, footballs, shampoo, toothpaste, lipstick, plastic toys, trash bags, umbrellas, tires — you name it.”

Not everyone is sounding the inflation alarm.

Forbes reports LPL Financial analysts have noted, “Across more than two dozen events since World War II, the S&P 500 averaged a one-day decline of about 1 percent, analysts said, adding markets tend to “absorb shocks” quickly before stabilizing and recovering “within a matter of weeks.” The S&P 500 dropped 1.2 percent when Iran attacked Israel in April 2024 and took just over two weeks to recover the loss, whereas the index rose 1 percent after the U.S. and Israel last struck Iran in June 2025.”

The underlying state of the economy, such as the health of the job market, interest rates and inflation, “matters more than the event itself,” LDL writes.

CNBC notes, “most economists say the impact from higher oil prices is difficult to gauge and could ultimately prove temporary, as has often been the case with past Middle East conflicts.”

Moreover, with the U.S. producing a larger share of its own energy, the broader economic impact of oil price spikes is not what it once was.

“In today’s American economy, spikes in oil prices do not present the same significant downside risk to top-line economic growth or inflation as they did a half century ago,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “The American economy is far less exposed to economic and inflation disruptions while its overall size has tripled.”

Rampell says Trump isn’t deliberately trying to raise prices, and acknowledges that presidents really don’t have a lot of tools to fight inflation.

“But between tariffs, mass deportations (and a resulting depletion in the agricultural workforce), politicizing the Federal Reserve, and bombing Iran, Trump seems intent on proving us wrong.”

The community of “involuntary celibate" men that trend toward President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have had a difficult year.

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte noted Wednesday that the biggest loser of 2025 appears to be the incel movement, which seems to have reached its peak.

Marcotte began with popular MAGA influencer Sólionath, who "[defended] white supremacist murderers, [tried] to get people fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk ... and [concocted] lies about the [Jeffrey] Epstein files."

Sólionath ended his year by bashing the 99 percent of the world that has had sex at some point in their life, claiming that few people have actually ever done it.

Mocking "Nazi apologist" Nick Fuentes, Marcotte recalled the Piers Morgan interview asking if he's ever had sex.

“No, absolutely not,” Fuentes said. He then admitted he finds it "very difficult to be around” women. Any man who does manage to score will end up “henpecked.”

"You think you’re an expert on women, given you never got laid?" Morgan asked.

After a year in office, Trump's MAGA movement is faltering, young white men are bailing in droves and the "incel" world has stumbled into a marketing problem, Marcotte wrote.

“Trumpist leaders love pointing the finger at LGBTQ+ people and liberals, calling them ‘groomers’ and suggesting they’re violent perverts," she continued. "But in 2025, the nation really saw how much that behavior is old-fashioned psychological projection.”

The best example of that comes from the investigation files around sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Marcotte. Trump has spent the past six months frantically trying to stop the release of the "the 5.2 million pages of documents" the government has on the federal investigation into Epstein

"The nation got a glimpse of the sexual world the president apparently inhabited, or at least stood in close proximity to, one which wasn’t glamorous but simply gross," said Marcotte.

“In 2025, ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ entered the lexicon, a term used to describe the combination of plastered-on makeup and aggressive plastic surgery that makes women look like inflatable sex dolls, as Trump’s apparent sexual tastes have morphed MAGA aesthetics into something inhuman," Marcotte continued.

Allthewhile, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and self-appointed "First Buddy," was exposed for having "a fetish for impregnating women."

"It may not initially seem obvious why Mar-a-Lago face, incels, Elon's pregnancy fetish or the Epstein files are linked," wrote Salon's Amanda Marcotte. "But this is a year in which MAGA showed they are very weird about sex. And it's hurting them."

Ultimately, the right wing populates the internet with "sexually dysfunctional straight men who argue that their romantic woes aren’t due to their own failures, but because feminism has ‘ruined’ women," Marcotte closed. “Either way, there’s one thing I can predict with confidence: We’ll get another round of articles handwringing about why it’s so hard for Republicans to find a date, which will show no understanding that the answer was always obvious.”

Read the full column here.