Trump’s Top Envoy Says Palais de l’Élysée Looks Just Like Mar-a-Lago
Just as we thought our current government had reached peak hubris, a Trump special envoy has compared the president’s Mar-a-Lago beach club in Florida to a historic 18th-century French palace.
Steve Witkoff, a former real estate mogul, made the absurd comment during his visit with Ukrainian and European officials at the French presidential palace last week. Gazing at the ceiling in a room identified as the Salon des Ambassadeurs in the Parisian Palais de l’Élysée, Trump’s longtime friend-turned-war diplomat announced to an audience of European officials that the gold-embellished room resembled the president’s Mar-a-Lago beach club.
“You know what this looks like,” Witkoff remarked during the April 17 meeting, “This actually looks like President Trump’s club at Mar-a-lago.”
Some of the adornments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs, including a detailed overdoor featuring golden ribbons and flowers, date back to between 1773 and 1786, when wealthy French banker Nicolas Beaujon purchased the mansion that would become the presidential residence in 1848 under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
Mar-a-Lago’s gold-decorated interior, meanwhile, served as the backdrop to photos used to indict Trump in 2023 for storing classified documents “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.” (The case was dismissed last July.)
In 2005, Trump created the “Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom” with a Louis XIV gold finish, according to the club’s website. In the president’s indictment, dozens of cardboard file boxes are pictured unattended in gilded sections of the hotel.
“This gold detailing,” Witkoff continued during the meeting last week, eliciting awkward laughs from the room of officials. “This is fabulous, what it looks like … he actually works on it himself. He’s like an architect, you know, or a designer.”
Trump promised in February to usher in a “golden age” for American arts and culture as he appointed himself the board chair of the Kennedy Center, a phrase he also used at his inauguration. And his interpretation appears to be literal, starting with his own fixation on golden decor.
In the months since Trump took office for his second term, the president appears to have modeled the Oval Office in fashion with his upscale resort, including gilding the television remote control in gold. The president has even replaced a live ivy planter with gold relics.
Trump’s over-the-top redecorations have prominently appeared in photos of Trump posing alongside world leaders whose governments have been accused of human rights violations, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
