HOBBY CORNER

Trump, 80, Turns Oval Office Into Tacky Model Airplane Museum

Tellingly, a virtual tour by the aging president’s team included the Batman logo.

The 80-year-old president of the United States has proudly transformed the Oval Office into a gilded young boy’s bedroom.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, 50, uploaded a video to Instagram on Wednesday showcasing just some of the changes Donald Trump has made to the place since taking office last year. The clip is cut to the soundtrack of The West Wing, though the music itself, bizarrely, cuts out before the video is actually done.

The president’s tacky gold additions to furnishings at the White House, some of which he’s understood to have added himself with the help of a little superglue, have been well documented. Decidedly less attention has been paid to the litany of model airplanes Trump has now dotted about his office.

Trump has set what appears to be a model of the Overture, a supersonic passenger jet that has yet to perform its maiden flight, pride of place on the Oval Office’s marble mantel, beside a bust of President Dwight Eisenhower. The model is done up in full presidential livery and perched on a stand bearing the logo of its manufacturer, Boom Supersonic.

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Boom chief executive Blake Scholl, 45, handed Trump just such a model in March last year, declaring that “Air Force One should be supersonic” and that Chinese President Xi Jinping, 73, “can keep his 747-8.” Three months later, Trump signed an executive order directing regulators to scrap the half-century-old ban on supersonic flight over American soil—a change from which Boom, which also enjoys Air Force funding, stands to benefit rather directly.

A few feet along sits what looks like the YF-16, the 1970s prototype of the F-16 fighter, in the star-spangled red, white and blue it wore for its first flight.

The mantel also boasts a jet in the blue and gold of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s flight demonstration squadron, mounted on a base with the team’s crest and a small brass plaque suggesting it may have arrived as somebody’s gift.

Rather less glamorous is the KC-135R Stratotanker, a flying gas station used to refuel other aircraft mid-air. The design first flew in 1956.

Beside the Resolute Desk itself, on either side of a bust of Abraham Lincoln, sit what seem to be two model F-35 stealth fighters in front of a two-foot model of a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, handed over last October by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Across from the desk, an old favorite sits on the coffee table—the Boeing 747 Trump hopes will one day carry him as Air Force One, in the red, white and navy paint job he has coveted since his first term. Joe Biden scrapped the design after taking office. The Air Force confirmed in February that it was back on—not just for the two long-delayed presidential jets, but for the entire VIP fleet, including the “palace in the sky” Trump accepted from Qatar.

Scavino also inexplicably added the Batman logo into the portion of his video where the camera pans past a ceremonial stock market opening bell, apparently suggesting that the golden bell is somehow a superhero signal and that the president, who has a conviction for falsifying business records, is the crimefighter extraordinaire to answer its call.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bell itself sits just across from the FIFA Club World Cup trophy—a 24-carat gold-plated, Tiffany & Co.-designed gyroscope, reportedly worth some $230,000, that Chelsea won a year ago this month by dispatching Paris Saint-Germain 3-0. It was a final chiefly remembered for the president planting himself among the celebrating players and resisting FIFA chief Gianni Infantino’s efforts to usher him offstage.

By then the trophy had already spent four months in the Oval Office, where Infantino deposited it in March 2025 after Trump cheerfully claimed that FIFA had told him he could keep it “forever” because the organization was “making a new one.”

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FIFA later clarified that there are in fact three trophies, and the original, engraved version resides in Zurich, as is custom—meaning the one in the president’s office is itself a replica, with Trump quite possibly the only person to believe it’s the real thing.

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