Do they know Trump, or do they know Trump?

The Guggenheim Museum offered President Trump a solid gold toilet from its collection as a "long-term loan" for the White House.

Trump and first lady Melania had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting from the museum, but the Guggenheim responded that it could not accommodate the request and offered the toilet instead, according to The Washington Post.

“We are sorry not to be able to accommodate your original request, but remain hopeful that this special offer may be of interest," curator Nancy Spector wrote in an email to the White House, according to the Post.

[...]

The 18-karat, fully functioning toilet was used as a temporary interactive exhibit in one of the museum’s bathrooms. The piece, titled “America,” has been described as satire mocking excessive wealth.

  The Hill

That is hysterical. The curator, who has publicly posted anti-Trump notes on social media, did it on purpose. Hope she keeps her job.

[T]he curator crafted her response to the White House’s request for Van Gogh’s “Landscape With Snow.” She explained that the painting — “prohibited from travel except for the rarest of occasions” — was on its way to be exhibited at the Guggenheim’s museum in Bilbao, Spain, and then would return to New York “for the foreseeable future.”

“Fortuitously,” Spector wrote, Cattelan’s “America” was available after having been “installed in one of our public restrooms for all to use in a wonderful act of generosity.”

She included with the email a photograph of the toilet “for your reference.”

[...]

For a year, the Guggenheim had exhibited “America” — the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan — in a public restroom on the museum’s fifth floor for visitors to use.

[...]

Cattelan, reached by phone in New York, referred questions about the toilet to the Guggenheim, saying with a chuckle, “It’s a very delicate subject.” Asked to explain the meaning of his creation and why he offered it to the Trumps, he said: “What’s the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.”

He declined to reveal the cost of the gold it took to create “America,” though it has been estimated to have been more than $1 million.

“I don’t want to be rude. I have to go,” the artist said, before hanging up.

[...]

At the Guggenheim, when Cattelan raised the notion of a gold toilet in mid-2015, Spector embraced the idea and got approval from the museum’s director, Richard Armstrong. Asked whether Armstrong supported the curator’s offer of the toilet to the White House, the Guggenheim’s spokeswoman replied, “We have nothing further to add.”

  WaPo

She may have checked with him first.

Trump might have taken them up on it had it not been used. (And that's what's even more hilarious - a used gold toilet.) On the other hand, he's probably got them in his penthouse and Mar-a-Lago.