Recently, Jonathan Swan – one of the authors of a new tell-all about Donald Trump’s second term – told the hosts of The View that if you had a pie chart of Trump’s mind, “a pretty substantial slice is devoted to interior decorating”. He also revealed that Trump is engaged in “design wars” with Melania and moved furniture she had selected into his spaces. The commander-in-chief apparently has even been caught supergluing gilded accents to the Oval Office mantel himself. Though Trump claims taxpayers won’t be on the hook for the costs of his renovations, the New York Times reported that the White House’s 18 major remodeling projects – from the botched Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to the paved-over Rose Garden to the looming “Arc de Trump” – will probably come with a price tag of $1.2bn.

Of course, Trump’s renovation compulsion didn’t start this year. The president celebrated winning his first term, in 2017, by ripping out the Oval Office’s royal blue carpet with the presidential seal and replacing it with a Mar-a-Lago peach version, accented with – what else? – gold. But in his second term, he’s gotten bolder, both politically and aesthetically – and more addicted. By the autumn of his first year back in office, he went ahead and tore down the East Wing entirely.

And, OK, I get it. In January, my husband and I bought a money pit of a house. In this economy, we counted ourselves lucky. But, within the first 24 hours of ownership, we had a fire, a leak, and the boiler burst, filling the basement with several inches of rusty water. There went the aesthetic tweaks we’d planned, not to mention the furniture. The problem was that my Instagram algorithm had already picked up on my new life stage. Soon, I was........

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