Two 19-foot statues called The Arts of War now stand near the Lincoln Memorial, freshly gilded with 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The work, pushed through by federal officials without competitive bids, puts public money to work polishing a president’s taste for spectacle while the National Park Service treated it as a high priority.
Who Pays for the Shine
The statues, once easy to miss, now loom as one of the most visible symbols of President Trump’s redecoration of Washington. They sit in stark contrast to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial nearby. The bronze figures were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded, but this round of shine came with a price tag that tells its own story: $5.1 million, awarded in April without seeking competitive bids.
Federal officials treated the project as a high priority, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents describing it as "a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives." That’s the apparatus at work. A presidential directive becomes a public project, and the public foots the bill.
Documents obtained by NOTUS said extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price. The agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland. The company did not respond to a message. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1.
What the Statues Mean to Power
The statues are called Valor and Sacrifice. They were sculpted by Leo Friedlander, cast in Italy and dedicated in 1951 as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby and still undergoing their golden glam-ups. Each statue sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War.
That old symbolism now gets folded into a new display of hierarchy. President Trump has already splashed gold all around the White House, and the statues are among the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, Trump posted photos on social media and tourists, commuters, cyclists and runners stopped to take pictures.
The article said Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard, pointing to Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom inspired by Versailles, golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, a gold-infused penthouse suite, and the Oval Office, which now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. The Oval Office has thick gold frames, gold vases and ice buckets, gold stars on the ceiling and gold appliqués. Trump insists these are real gold, not painted flourishes from Home Depot.
The Gilded Logic of Rule
Trump last year exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs and named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He also took his personally designed presidential challenge coin, which is golden, and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.
When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented Trump with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. Trump said during a Cabinet meeting in March, "See, I’m a gold person."
The article said Trump has loved gold and marble for decades. Ivana Trump, his first wife and the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged his gold obsession, according to Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Ivana’s love of the color lasted; she was buried in a gold casket. In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago and put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired designer Henry Conversano, known for golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he bought from the sultan of Brunei a yacht bathed in gold and named it the Trump Princess.
Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, said, "It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there." He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble. In 2008, Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas with a 406,000-square-foot facade coated in gold-infused glass. More recently, supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, with a gold finish.
Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, said, "To him gold was the essence of richness and class." She added, "To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best." She said he also liked trompe l’oeil, "tricking the eye of the consumer," and that his taste reflected "his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful."
Trump has said, "I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good," "It just beams," and "It’s all real stuff." He also said, "You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world." Peter York wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is "aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of," and said, "The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style."
Gold has often been used to represent imperial power in 18th-century France and 19th-century Russia. On Trump’s first foreign trip of his second term to the Middle East, he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. He said in June ahead of a trip to the palace, "Versailles is not a gold leaf. Versailles is the real deal."
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement, "No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump." He said Trump’s "bold vision" was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with "glory and pride." The Department of Interior said, "Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be."
The article said Trump added the statues to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, and the scaffolding remained up for weeks before the statues came into view. An ARTNews review called them "Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom."