Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

Trump Is Turning the White House Into a Golden Goose

October 24, 2025 at 9:00 AM UTC

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

Very gold.
Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg

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When Donald Trump was demolishing the Bonwit Teller building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in 1980 to make way for Trump Tower, the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached him with a small request. It asked the young developer to preserve a pair of historic limestone friezes adorning Bonwit’s façade.

Trump agreed to look after the friezes and donate them to the museum. But he later ordered them “smashed by jackhammers” after deciding they were too expensive to preserve and “without artistic merit,” as the New York Times reported at the time. (Undocumented Polish immigrants handled the demolition.)