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In my 30 years of studying the literature and culture of Louis XIV, I never thought I would see an American president actually model himself on the Sun King, to the point that a recent essay in the New York Times declared the current Oval Office décor a “gilded rococo hellscape.” Along with the anti-royalist sentiment that used to characterize U.S. politics, I always assumed that most Americans had no real stomach for the hubris and sheer garishness that defined the style and surroundings of France’s most famous king. When I’ve taken students to Versailles, I’ve noticed that as much as they admire the size and ambitiousness of the château that Louis XIV declared the center of French government, they nonetheless agree with the caustic assessment of the Duke de Saint-Simon, Louis XIV’s greatest critic: It’s “a masterpiece of bad taste.”
In fact, the White House is the third residence that Trump has tried to make resemble Versailles. Interior designer Angelo Donghia incorporated some gold elements into his initial vision for the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower, and Henry Conversano added much more in a later redesign, with the result being something New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger described in a 2017 talk as a “pseudo-Versailles in the sky.” But it’s less well known that the ghosts of Versailles also haunt Mar-a-Lago, where, when adding a ballroom, Trump ditched the Spanish theme of the original building and chose instead to mimic the Sun King’s Hall of Mirrors. A 2007 appraisal of Mar-a-Lago made for the Trump Organization by the firm Callaway and Price described the ballroom as “in the style of Versailles, in a Louis XIV gold and crystal finish, with huge crystal chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall.” Apparently it’s this ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, with its $7 million of gold leaf, that Trump wants now to re-create in the East Wing; the gold cherubs have already been brought up from Florida. No doubt, if it’s ever completed, this third Versailles revamp will have a ceiling painting to rival the original by Charles Le Brun depicting Louis XIV’s military victories. (Perhaps, instead, “Donald Trump vanquishes DEI”?)
More disturbing, of course, than the president’s taste is the administration’s view of executive authority. This evokes the absolutist rhetoric of Louis XIV’s worst sycophants, which Saint-Simon despised. One can almost hear the echoes of the Versailles courtiers in the Trump Cabinet’s paeans to the president’s leadership, and Saint-Simon’s description of the Sun King’s appetite for adulation, found in the writer’s secret Mémoires, published after his death, surely suggests our own leader’s vulnerability to such praise: “The self-effacement, the self-abasement, the look of admiration, subjugation, supplication, most of all the look of negation except through him, were the sole means of pleasing him.” (That translation is my own.) Saint-Simon knew that when kings embrace their own flattery, they open themselves to manipulation, and the writer viewed Louis XIV as an illusory absolutist who was in fact controlled by fawning scoundrels. Sort of like if an American president were to be hoodwinked by a Russian dictator offering him a complimentary portrait.
The irony is that Donald Trump is not governing like Louis XIV, and we would probably be better off if he did. The Sun King massively invested in science, technology, the arts, and intellectual activity; Trump disdains them all. Louis XIV created the Royal Academy for Sciences, the Royal Academy for Painting and Sculpture, the Royal Academy for Dance; Trump cuts the National Institutes of Health, bullies the Kennedy Center, threatens Big Bird. Louis XIV built roads, paved streets, carved canals, constructed ports; Trump freezes infrastructure spending and may decimate the National Park Service. You don’t get Versailles by firing state workers.
No, in terms of incompetence, ideology-driven decisionmaking, and a deliberate lack of imagination, the president resembles less Louis XIV and more his great-great-grandson—a man who became king by accident, married a woman from central Europe, and was unable to assume the grandeur of his Versailles forebear. He ruled as Louis XVI, and perhaps his finest decision was supporting the rebellious American colonists against France’s oldest enemy, the British. Because of this mediocre king, who clung so desperately to the fantasies of absolutism that he was later overthrown and guillotined by his own people, the American experiment with republican government was able to commence. It’s an irony of history that Trump’s love affair with Louis XIV may mean that this experiment will ultimately be continued somewhere else—in some land we probably now consider backward and uncivilized, and where a gilded hall of mirrors has less attraction than a system of laws and values against authoritarianism.
