Trump Stops Motorcade at Random Strip Mall to Go Marble Shopping
Donald Trump’s motorcade stopped at a random strip mall in Florida Friday morning so that the president could purchase marble and onyx for his increasingly expensive White House ballroom.
According to White House pool reports, “The motorcade arrived at a shopping center in Lake Worth, Florida at 9:46 AM.... The pool is told that POTUS is shopping at Arc Stone & Tile.” A White House official said that the president “is purchasing lake and onyx, at his own expense, for the White House ballroom.”
It’s perhaps no surprise that Trump wants marble in his White House ballroom. Trump first estimated the ballroom would cost only $200 million, but the president now claims the cost has skyrocketed to double that.
Trump has brought his longtime obsession with marble to his second term, pushing for it to appear just about everywhere. He urged the Federal Reserve building to be renovated with a marble facade, even as the architects wanted glass walls to indicate the agency’s transparency—and has since tried to use the renovation’s high cost as grounds to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
More recently, he redid the bathroom in the White House Lincoln Suite entirely in marble, and he has proposed marble armrests for the Kennedy Center, claiming it would be “unlike anything ever done or seen before!” (Perhaps there’s a reason no one wants marble armrests.)
It remains to be seen whether Trump will indeed pay for the marble himself—or if he’ll add it to the taxpayers’ bill.
A new year, a new lie: The White House is apparently banking that the American public won’t remember what Donald Trump said about his own health just three months ago.
Trump admitted several times on camera to receiving an MRI in October—as did his physician, who released a report in December officially declaring that Trump’s MRI came back “perfectly normal.” Despite that, Trump now claims that he didn’t get an MRI after all, and that the medical assessment instead amounted to a CT scan.
“It wasn’t an MRI,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Thursday. “It was less than that. It was a scan.”
The White House has never offered a reason as to why Trump received scans to begin with, but there are some key differences between the two medical assessments. An MRI utilizes magnetic fields to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. A CT scan, in comparison, is much faster as it uses X-rays to detect illness and injuries such as cancer, bone fractures, internal bleeding, or lung problems.
The president was remarkably cagey at the time about the scans he received at Walter Reed National Military Medical in early October. At first, he claimed his visit was little more than a “routine yearly checkup,” even though he already received his annual physical just six months prior.
There are also some unexplained discrepancies in the timeline of Trump’s visit to the military hospital. Former White House physician Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served under former President Barack Obama, suggested that Trump could have gotten more work done than was initially revealed, pointing to just how much time he was spending at Walter Reed.
Trump is the oldest person to be elected president. In an interview with The Hill in November, Kuhlman noted that while it wouldn’t be unusual for a 79-year-old to require a second checkup, it was odd that Trump’s supposedly routine tests and reported scans amounted to a four-hour visit at the hospital, according to his schedule.
Trump’s health has been a topic of concern since he was on the campaign trail, when reports circulated that he couldn’t remember the contents of the cognitive exams he claimed to ace. Since then, the president has been spotted with odd discolorations on his hand, routinely appears discombobulated and lethargic during critical meetings with world leaders, and had a drooping expression during 9/11 ceremonies in September that onlookers suggested could be a sign of a stroke.
President Donald Trump has rung in 2026 by threatening war on two fronts—and picking a bizarre fight with American actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal.
Trump on New Year’s Eve trashed the actor’s decision to leave the United States and obtain French citizenship with his wife and two children. Calling the couple “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time,” Trump went on a long Truth Social rant attacking their move.
“Good News! George and Amal Clooney, two of the worst political prognosticators of all time, have officially become citizens of France which is, sadly, in the midst of a major crime problem because of their absolutely horrendous handling of immigration, much like we had under Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump wrote. “Remember when Clooney, after the now infamous debate, dumped Joe during a fundraiser, only to go onto the side of another stellar candidate, Jamala(K!), who is now fighting it out with the worst governor in the Country, including Tim Waltz, Gavin Newscum, for who is going to lead the Democrats to their future defeat. Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies. He wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy who complained, constantly, about common sense in politics.”
In a statement later Thursday to The Hollywood Reporter, Clooney hit back: “I totally agree with the current president. We have to make America great again. We’ll start in........© New Republic
