A job tailor made for Trump

Tour guide.

When President Trump brings senators, New York friends or other guests to the Oval Office, he occasionally opens a door near his desk summoning them to follow. Flashing a grin, he wants his friends to see where Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky reportedly began their sexual encounters.

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In a visit in 2017, Trump told a TV anchor, “I’m told this is where Bill and Monica . . .” — stopping himself from going further, according to “Team of Vipers,” a new book by former White House aide Cliff Sims that The Washington Post obtained before its publication Tuesday.

Three other people who have embarked on a tour with Trump said he made similar comments regarding the former president and White House intern, laughing and making facial expressions.

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Trump relishes giving tours to acquaintances and strangers by the hundreds, bragging all the while about improving it while he lives there, according to nearly a dozen visitors and current and former White House aides.

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“Most people want to keep parts of the White House private for their families and themselves,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said of previous presidents. “He’s very restless and doesn't like desk work. He’d rather roam around and B.S. with people than hunker down.”

[...]

The president has also claimed to guests, without evidence, that his private dining room off the Oval Office was in “rough shape” and had a hole in the wall when he came into the West Wing and that President Barack Obama used it to watch sports, according to two White House officials and two other people who have heard him discuss the dining room. “He just sat in here and watched basketball all day,” Trump told a recent group, before saying he upgraded Obama’s smaller TV to a sprawling, flat-screen one, the four people said.

  WaPo

Hilarious.

A George W. Bush aide said he rarely took people into the residence, largely because his family was there. The Obama aide said he only took close friends into the residence — “not D.C. officials,” the aide said. Trump, by contrast, has summoned hundreds, if not thousands, of people upstairs, aides said.

The president’s desire to show off his abode fits a pattern. At Trump Tower in New York, he would show guests celebrity relics, such as basketball great Shaquille O’Neill’s shoes, signed magazine covers and photos with athletes.

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“Is this the best turkey you’ve ever had?” he asked guests under the gilded ceilings of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last Thanksgiving, according to a person who heard the comments. “Did you see how great those greens look?” he asked a recent golf guest.

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Numerous people who have gone on the tours describe a president boasting about the artifacts and art in his temporary home.

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Aides said Trump is often gregarious and charming when showing off the residence, rather than displaying the churlish demeanor he sometimes shows in West Wing meetings.

I'm not sure you can call bragging about everything "charming".

The tours sometimes come intermixed with commentary on the day’s news, including asking guests which Democrats might beat him in 2020 as well as complaints about the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. “There was no collusion,” he recently told a group of Congress members as he strolled through the residence, said a person on the tour. “It’s completely insane!”

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Trump often has groused about flies in the White House and has told groups that his aides have mixed luck killing them. “Swarming everywhere,” he said at one point early in his presidency, according to a senior White House official, backing up an account in Sims’s book.

The president also has complained that the offices and the bathrooms in the West Wing do not meet his standards. Sims describes how Trump went through an extensive renovation, much of which he oversaw.

“Cosmetic updates happen with the transition of each new administration, of course, but I doubt any president has ever been as hands-on as The Donald,” Sims writes.

Guess who's paying for this? Not Mexico.

He often shows off the Louisiana Land Purchase, the Gettysburg Address and other historic documents, visitors say. He has commented on particular presidents — Andrew Jackson, whom he praises, and Ulysses S. Grant, whom he called “not so good,” according to a person who visited the residence in 2018.

Trump also has bragged during some visits about the pictures of him on the walls of the West Wing — including one with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and another of his inauguration — and how photos of him get framed and hung quickly by White House staff members when he asks.

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He brags about how many television sets there are in the West Wing and his fancy system of toggling between channels made for him — he calls it a “Super TiVo,” according to White House aides and Sims’s book.

“I think it’s one of the greatest inventions,” Trump has said, according to Sims.

That should tell us how much TV he watches. He had a special system made so he could flip back and forth between channels. Couldn't he just get a picture-in-picture TV?

As he has done often in a political career encompassing thousands of documented falsehoods, Trump has exaggerated at times in describing the tours. “They start to cry,” he has told others in explaining how people react when seeing the Oval Office, according to current and former White House aides.

Two senior White House officials said they had never seen any visitor cry in the Oval Office.

Probably because no one ever has.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.