Among the leaked White House stories reported in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump is one that most of us could have guessed. One morning, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt entered the Oval Office to find the president with a tube of super glue in his hand, trying to stick more gold decorations on the mantel of the marble fireplace.

“Bad taste leads to crime,” the Baron de Mareste, a French civil servant and friend of Stendahl’s, is said to have said in the nineteenth century. True and true for Donald Trump. The super glue detail nudges this excruciating anecdote into an eerie kind of pathos. The man is a rapist and a war criminal, but the image of his hunched, bloated figure putzing with DIY décor suggests a lantern-holding servant scuffling through a medieval castle. Next up, I imagine: staple-gunning hundred-dollar bills (you know, the new ones bearing his signature) directly onto the wallpaper.

The capital’s MAGA occupiers obviously have no problem with the “conspicuous consumption” Thorstein Veblen identified among the Gilded Age leisure class. In the 1880s, though, things got contentious: the old money oligarchs despised the conspicuously consuming nouveau riche and their tendency to think quantitatively: adding more of the same and making it bigger. This is the guiding principle in Trump’s White House, where recently begun “repairs” to the massive columns of the building’s front entrance are making preservationists jittery. Will the Ionic columns come out unscathed, or will Trump decide to add some squiggly baroque stuff at the top?

What the Baron’s “bad taste leads to crime” leaves out is the role that poverty plays in both. I’m sure there are many financially successful and civically responsible people who happen to have bad taste. But the cultivation of taste is something that poverty—the kind of family you were born into—outright denies. For the poor, having bad taste is generally the least of your problems: making bad choices when there are no other options is what does you in.

Donald Trump was born into an upwardly mobile Queens family led by a man whose ruthlessness as a property developer is stereotypically associated with the class he was trying to leave. Trump’s siblings seem to have assimilated into a higher social stratum and its attendant tastes, however banal; he himself did not. He likely never understood consensual good taste in his Manhattan heyday. As a malignant narcissist, he could neither conform to the prevailing class taste nor accept the dissonance. What he did and does understand is esthetic objects that have monetary value in their very material—gold and marble—so he created an esthetic where he could make things out of what was already valuable.

But then his lack of any feeling for authentic design and workmanship constantly trips him up. At least the Gilded Age parvenus bought the real thing with their new money. With Trump, people often discover that his ballyhooed luxury is either got on the cheap or altogether phony. Though he never had the money he claimed, he was still wealthy by contemporary standards, so it’s hard to see why he so often risked being found out and was so often found out.

The actor Charlie Sheen told of encountering Trump and Melania at a restaurant right before Sheen’s third marriage in 2008 and noticing Trump staring at Sheen’s watch. Trump reportedly told the actor: “I want to give you an early wedding gift as a gesture from me and Melania. . . . These are platinum diamond Harry Winston.” Then Trump removed his cufflinks and gave them to Sheen. This gesture—bizarre in and of itself—became more so when Sheen later had the cufflinks appraised and was told by the jeweler that not only were they “cheap pewter and bad zirconias,” they were also stamped “Trump.”

Many rich people don’t understand what it is about the look, sound, and feel of their watch that makes it so ungodly expensive, but the fact that it’s ungodly expensive makes them feel good about themselves. Though Trump wants to win every contest of status, he refuses to compete in societal forums with agreed-on benchmarks. Instead, he invents forums where only he can win. Or else he mocks and subverts societal forums by cheating. Sheen’s detail of Trump noticing his watch is telling: I’m sure the actor wore a status watch while Trump wore cheap cufflinks. Was Trump angered by the thought of Sheen being a connoisseur of the taste he himself doesn’t understand and therefore detests? Did he want to stick it to Sheen by getting him to wear the fake Harry Winstons? Or did he in that moment of insecurity need a dopamine hit from the image of Sheen being impressed by the magnitude of the gesture? Something about Sheen made Trump suddenly want to shed the evidence of his pretense—his fake wealth—and yet by giving the evidence to Sheen, he seemed to be asking to be outed and shamed.

The mainstream media ties itself in knots trying to explain Trump’s decorating fixations without passing judgment on his taste. The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer called him “a hobbyist who happens to be president, and he gets to do his hobby with public taxpayer dollars to whatever extent he wants.” Does Trump feel genuine satisfaction or pleasure in any of these “hobbies”? Probably not, since their only purpose is to give him the constant attention he needs to survive another hour. With his decorating concepts, he tells you before you’ve even seen something that it will be the best and everyone will love it. He creates both the use case and the forum for assessment. People’s reactions play no part in a process where he relentlessly hammers his own narrative.

It’s not rare for egomaniacs to have bad taste and make a gaudy show of it. But with Trump, the “making a show” is the only reason he bothers with taste. His sole promotional logic is too-big-to-fail, and the stifling unavoidability of his brazen taste, I think, means that he either consciously or unconsciously knows it’s bad. He knows it and uses it as a weapon just like any comic book villain.

Take, for instance, his dress shoe impressment reported on in March by the Wall Street Journal. Because Trump likes wearing $145 black leather shoes made by mall-brand Florsheim, he wants all the men in his cabinet and beyond to wear them. He has force-gifted pairs (you must wear the size he has guessed even if it’s wrong) to Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Howard Lutnick, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, the late Lindsey Graham, and others. He reportedly “presents them with the enthusiasm of a travelling salesman,” causing one cabinet member to privately complain about having to retire his Louis Vuittons. My guess is that those very Louis Vuittons—worn either by Lutnick or Scott Bessent—were the reason for Trump’s shoe-pushing, not Rubio’s or Vance’s crappy footwear. Trump advertising to the world that he can’t see any difference in the quality of shoes beyond $145 seems terribly ironic in the context of a famous line from one of his speech riff favorites, Hannibal Lecter. In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter tells Clarice Starling: “You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.”

There has never been a psychological study as startlingly obvious as this president. All of his putzing projects have come out of deep-seated insecurity. The ballroom because he doesn’t have the panache of the Obamas’ second Camelot. The arch because he was a cowardly draft dodger and wants to overshadow and erase heroic sacrifice. The Reflecting Pool because he remembers imagines from the night of Biden’s inauguration: the water lined on both sides with lights representing American lives lost to COVID under his watch. Instead of mourning the dead along with his country, Trump the comic book villain was plotting his revenge in exile.

Was revenge enough for him to want to return to the scene of the crime? Super glue anecdote aside, what’s probably the major drop of Haberman and Swan’s book is that Trump ran for president in 2024 to stay out of jail—which is horrendous for a democracy but the most rational choice a serial crime committer could make. Once he solved that problem, it’s been a smash-and-grab free-for-all, enabling the hobbyist to pursue his lifelong passion for illegally enriching himself while attempting to illegally punish his enemies.

You might say that putting his craven mark on a city and country by playing decorator is a crime category unto itself, but I would include it under punishing his enemies. He’s doing so by weaponizing his bad taste to steal the wellbeing of every American who despises him. Having a leader torture you with bad taste is obviously better than being dragged off the street and waterboarded. But given this comic book villain’s plans for the midterm elections, the waterboarding might be on a short horizon. §