A fear of the unclean and imperfect
John Oakes on Trump, slime, and gold
Today John Oakes returns to write about Donald Trump's obsession with gold and his fear of germs.
"A terror of infection goes hand-in-glove with an obsession for gold, for Trump the only material that will render what is unclean clean, and stay clean," he writes.
I interviewed Oakes a couple years back about his book The Fast: The History, Science, and Philosophy of Doing Without. He also wrote about hunger strikes and the FX series Say Nothing for Hell World here:
Luke O’Neil
The President, Slime, and Gold
by John Oakes
The list of Trump’s fixations is long, but in his dotage he keeps coming back to two things: germs and gold. Both are intertwined, even interdependent.
Through six bankruptcies and innumerable promises made and broken, only gold remains for Trump. It is his one unyielding constant. Gold is not merely something shiny that he wants to surround himself with. It represents stability and purity to a degree hard for most of us to imagine. Gold is god, and it is at his fingertips.
On Sunday, September 28, 2025, not four hours after he had learned that a U.S. Marine veteran had killed four people in a Michigan church and set it on fire, Trump posted on Truth Social a 37-second-long video that panned silently across gold-covered decorations scheduled to be installed at the White House. The silence, uncharacteristic of the president, underscored a moment of reverential contemplation.
To accompany the video, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT.”
Shortly after more than 170 people were killed in the U.S. bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, at a March 2, 2026 ceremony convened to award the Medal of Honor to three members of the U.S. armed forces, Trump found himself again diverted by gold, this time the golden drapes in the White House. “I picked those drapes in my first term,” he said, as he gestured to them. “I always liked gold . . .”
Why gold, and how is it connected to slime? No germs gather on Trump’s gold, or anyone’s gold. Few ideas are more powerful than the fear of infection, and germ-free and bio-inert gold is a shield against this fear. And few people fear germs more intensely than Trump, described by a Politico journalist as “the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world,” a claim backed repeatedly both by the president’s words and his actions.
During Trump’s time in the public eye, several incidents occurred that attest to his deep-seated mysophobia, what he himself has often referred to as “germophobia,” a fear of the unclean and by extension the imperfect. His obsession over the slime “polluting” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is only the latest manifestation. When his aide Kellyanne Conway coughed at a staff meeting in the aftermath of his first campaign in 2016, Trump reportedly “went nuts” and left the area. During an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC News in 2019, when his then-chief of staff Mick Mulvaney coughed, Trump ordered him to leave. At a press conference on February 11, 2025, in the Oval Office together with Elon Musk and his four-year-old son, Trump could be seen looking askance as the little boy picked his nose and wiped it on the Resolute Desk. Thereafter, as Trump proclaimed in a Truth Social post, he had the 1,300-pound desk disassembled and removed for “a light refinishing—a very important job.” Trump even cited his phobia as a defense against the notorious dossier that claimed he was the recipient of a “golden shower” in a Moscow hotel room: “Does anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way, believe me.”
And un-gold, a total lack of gold as manifested by a deluge of bacteria- and germ-soaked matter, is what Trump’s enemies merit: on October 18, 2025, the same day as millions expressed their opposition to his regime in “No Kings” rallies across the nation, Trump re-posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a golden crown, dumping excrement on protesters in Times Square. His opponents deserved to be drowned in filth.
A terror of infection goes hand-in-glove with an obsession for gold, for Trump the only material that will render what is unclean clean, and stay clean. “I can’t tell you how much that gold cost,” he told reporters gathered in his revamped Oval Office in September 2025, gesturing to the new gold finishes. “A lotta money. There’s nothing like gold, and there’s nothing like solid gold, but this beautiful office needed it,” he said. “It had to be represented. When we took it over it was dirty, not clean.” Gold’s duality here asserts itself. Its lifelessness and its unchangeability mesh with a fear of infection and foreignness, and outweigh its attribute as a store of value. Gold is transformed into a weapon against what is “alien” and “dirty,” or germ-infested. The one ethnic minority Trump has taken a shine to—South African whites—comes from a country known for its gold output (and, for generations, its brutal exploitation of Black gold miners). Save the whites, save the gold.
A Freudian might remind us that mysophobia has its roots in early childhood. A baby likes to grasp. When a baby releases its poop they lose something they created. An unhealthy “doubting mania” that magnifies opposing forces can result, says Dr. Michael Garfinkle, a psychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine, and neurosis can be the outcome. Poor baby Trump. Forced to release his crap, which was all that he could create, and told that he couldn’t play with it because it was bad: dark and dirty. The boy took the message a little too closely to heart.
If “dirt is matter in the wrong place” (as Freud wrote in English in his otherwise German-language 1908 essay “Character and Anal Erotism”), gold is matter put just right. Gold is the opposite extreme of filth, which is disgusting, chaotic, and corrupt, by definition impure. We cast filth aside. It is not precious. Filth is a prelude to or by-product of death, but gold is stable, divine output, complete and pure.
Trump’s connection to gold becomes a litany that dulls the metal’s star-born shine. He redecorated the Oval Office with gold finishes, he’s put it in the bathroom, he had a twenty-two-foot-tall golden statue of himself installed at one of his golf clubs, he called a U.S. residency purchasing program for wealthy-would be immigrants the Trump Gold Card. Even “gorgeous paper” that had to be signed “for a general” could be elevated by the application of a golden flourish: “I said, “Throw a little more gold on it. They deserve it.”
But of course what the president has done, caught up in psychosis and a pointless, destructive quest for personal, cultural, and racial purity, is to devalue the thing that he loves above anything else—because something that is spread everywhere becomes commonplace. It loses its impact. And the rest of us pay the price.
John Oakes is the author of the forthcoming book Precious Metal: 79 Ways of Looking at Gold. He is publisher of The Evergreen Review.
The Evergreen Review were nice enough to publish an excerpt from We Had It Coming a while back. You can read it here:
