President Donald Trump has answered a historic Republican midterm beating by remaining focused on his favorite subject, Donald Trump. While some White House staff members reportedly looked on with dismay, the president continued his effort to cover the nation’s capital in his ornate personal aesthetic.

Trump signed a proclamation Friday naming the Oval Office a national monument. The strange exercise appears designed to make it harder for future presidents to reverse his decorative choices and to preserve his role as project manager in chief.

President Barack Obama mocked Trump’s heavily gilded Oval Office makeover last month, saying it looks “like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Conservatives responded with predictable outrage, while Democrats had already discussed reversing changes Trump made to the White House.

The incoming Democratic majority may also decide to halt some Trump construction projects. Those projects include the giant ballroom now rising where the East Wing once stood, another piece of the president’s architectural vanity campaign.

The proclamation concedes that the White House and its grounds are already recognized as a National Historic Landmark. Yet it provides the Oval Office and Cabinet Room with a special carveout, because apparently the existing designation was not sufficiently soothing.

Under the proclamation, the National Park Service will require “documentation, review, and consideration of alternatives before any action that would substantially alter or demolish the monument or its essential architectural elements.” That bureaucratic language gives Trump’s decorating preferences a grandiose official frame.

During the signing, Trump also claimed congressional action would be needed to secure the proclamation. “We’re going to be declaring it a national monument, and we’re going to send it over to Congress, have it ratified,” Trump told reporters.

Trump continued: “If they want to say, ‘Let’s not have oval anymore, let’s make it square,’ what happens is they have to go back to Congress and hopefully the Congress, the people in Congress, will be smart enough not to let that happen.” The proclamation itself does not mention Congress.

Instead, the document relies on the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permits a president to create a national monument on federal land by proclamation without congressional input. Lawyers disagree about whether a later president can revoke or diminish an established monument without Congress.

Trump’s own Justice Department has already taken a position that clashes with his latest posture. When the administration sought to undo monuments created by President Joe Biden, it argued that the Antiquities Act’s “power to declare carries with it the power to revoke.”

Calling on Congress to protect Trump’s gaudy alterations is therefore inconsistent with his administration’s own view of presidential authority. It is also especially rich coming from a president who has steadfastly resisted congressional attempts to restrict him on most matters.

Even if Congress eventually became involved, Trump appears to have missed an obvious political obstacle. The Democrats taking office soon would likely be perfectly willing to approve efforts reversing his gold covered makeover.

The timing only makes the spectacle more embarrassing. The day before the midterm elections, Trump held a news conference where he boasted about renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool rather than moving his attention away from his construction fixation.

The day after the election, Trump signed the final beam for the White House ballroom alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Burgum called Trump “the builder in chief” and “the greatest builder that has ever been president of the United States,” a declaration that practically erases New Deal construction.

For all the pomp, the proclamation explicitly leaves future presidents room to redecorate. It says, “Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to restrict the President’s authority to redecorate the monument, select furnishings, or make ordinary operational and security modifications that do not substantially impair the monument’s historic structure or architectural character.”

That means whoever takes office in January 2029 could remove Trump’s wall sconces, replace the gold curtains and restyle the space. The supposed monument to Trump’s taste may not protect much of his taste at all.

Friday’s production felt less like serious governing than White House staff placating a toddler approaching a tantrum. A staffer wrote the proclamation, newly installed White House chief of staff Stephen Miller likely reviewed it, and a communications aide prepared a fact sheet.

A staff secretary also had to schedule the signing, consuming government resources for a document with little practical impact. The entire exercise captures the vanity and escapism that have left the GOP rudderless while Trump is supposed to be working for the public.