Is Trump Selling Himself Back His D.C. Hotel?

The president hits new heights of kleptocratic chicanery. Plus an update on the endangered “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

You know already that President Donald Trump is on a rampage to build hideous oversized structures in Washington, D.C. (the Epstein Ballroom, the Arc de Trump) and to deface existing structures using exorbitant no-bid contracts. We got some good news this past weekend when a judge made Trump take “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I only wish the judge further required the president to hang the removed letters on the clubhouse portico at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, rearranged anagrammatically into UNHAT DAMP NJ TODDLER.

What you may not know is that the Trump administration is also on a tear to unload government buildings that it’s judged to be all cost and no value. The General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s real estate arm, is selling off government real estate at fire-sale prices into an historically depressed commercial market. These prices are lousy even within the context of the post-Covid office-space glut, making the GSA look very foolish as it claims thrifty stewardship of the taxpayer dollar.

I’ve been primarily concerned about the fate of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the GSA designated last year for “accelerated disposition.” Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen Building to me last September as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, Ethel and Jenne Magafan—and most especially Ben Shahn, whose dry frescoes along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, “The Meaning of Social Security,” Shahn judged “the best work I’ve done.” (To read my earlier pieces on the Cohen building and the Shahns click here, here, here, and here. These were followed up in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and USA Today.)

I won’t tug your lapel too long about the Cohen, which has yet to be sold, because my subject today is those buildings that the Trump administration has sold already, most especially the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leased during his first administration and refurbished as a hotel. The Trump International Hotel became a kleptocratic vortex before Trump sold it at the end of his first term well above market value. Now Trump is poised to re-purchase not just the lease but the entire building at a heavy discount, shredding whatever remains of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses as he uses the presidency to expand his fortune at a rate of $1 billion or more per year.

More on that in a moment. Permit me first to update you about the Cohen building.

Neither Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, nor her staff, knew that the Cohen building housed precious New Deal art before she inserted into a January 2025 water resources bill a provision requiring that it be sold off “no later than two years” after being vacated (which has not yet occurred). Such ignorance is astonishing given that the Cohen lies a mere two blocks from the United States Capitol, but I wouldn’t call it atypical of how the Republican congressional majority operates.

After Ernst learned about the art, she said in a written statement: “It speaks volumes that only 2 percent of the folks who were actually paid to work at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building were showing........

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