• im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
    54·
    5 days ago

    I listened to this podcast recently:

    Well, so we know we went and saw him in the middle of the war. I mean, early stages of the war, very intense period of the war, about two weeks and a bit into the war with Iran. And he the thing he first thing he wanted us to see, he was holding up photographs of maple trees. And he’s saying, you know, I’m buying these maple trees for the White House. Turns out I’m good at buying trees. And then underneath it were photographs of the ballroom and the columns. He wanted us to know the columns are, I think, bigger than the Supreme Court’s columns or more of them or what have you. And one side was inspired by Athens and the other side by Rome. This occupied probably first 15 minutes of our time with him before we got to anything to do with the Iran war.

    and earlier …

    It’s truly an inordinate amount of his time is spent redecoration, renovation, the ballroom, but also building monuments and naming things after himself. It’s become an obsession. And we have a scene in the book, actually, in the Oval Office last October where he he’s talking to a couple of visitors about he wants to build essentially a replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Washington, which they call internally the Arc de Trump. You know, he’s got different models of it. There’s a huge one, a middle one, a small one. You know, he wants it to be bigger than the Lincoln Memorial. Anyway, he’s in the room with some of his agents. He says, let’s call Emmanuel. Let’s call Emmanuel. Ask because he had some questions he wanted to know about the Arc de Triomphe, which presumably he could have just Googled. […] But instead, he gets Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, on the speakerphone. And he starts asking Emmanuel, you know, does your arch have a viewing platform? Do people jump off it? You know, all this. How big is the arch? You know, all these sort of questions about the arch. So I just there’s no way that I can overstate how much time is spent on these matters.

    (emphasis added)

    That last sentence has really stuck with me.