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President Donald Trump turned heads again this week for a viral cabinet meeting tangent about a favorite custom White House Sharpie. He said the marker is an example of how he can get “better” results for less cost.
The president brought up the pen while criticizing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over a new headquarters, which he said costs the government $4 billion.
“If it was properly done and planned, you would have done that building for — I would have done it — for $25 million, and it would be better,” he said. He then reached for a marker on the table and said, “See this pen right here? This pen is an interesting example.”
Trump said that he was having issues with the old Oval Office pens, which he said were inlaid with gold and silver, running out of ink. He said he also felt “guilty” about wasting money by handing them out to as many as 40 people every time he signed an executive action. So, he decided to replace the expensive pens with customized White House Sharpies.
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“It’s the same thing,” he told his cabinet and members of the press. “This pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well; I like it.”
“I came here, and they have thousand-dollar pens, and you hand pens out, you’re signing, and you’re handing them out, you’re handing them out with all these people, sometimes you have 30, 40 people, and they were a thousand dollars apiece,” he said. “Beautiful pen, ballpoint, a thousand, there was gold, silver, gorgeous. But I’m handing it out to kids that don’t even know what they are. ‘What is this, Mommy?’ It’s kids, they’re getting a pen for a thousand dollars, and they have no idea what it is.”
He said he felt “guilty” because “I want to save money.”
“So, I’m saying this is crazy,” he explained. “And it had another problem. They didn’t write well.”
However, despite his preference for Sharpies, Trump said he couldn’t “have the pen the way it was.”
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The president said he considered signing documents in a separate room, or “I could do like Biden did, you know, give it to somebody else to sign or an autopen?”
“This is when I called the guy. I said, ‘I’d like to use your pen, but I can’t have a grey thing with a big ‘S’ on it saying ‘Sharpie’ as I’m signing a trillion dollar airplane contract to buy brand-new fighter jets – brand new B-2 bombers, of which we just ordered plenty – I can’t do that with the press, use your pen, but I like the pen the best.”
According to Trump, a Sharpie representative then said, “Well, I could make it nicer.”
“I said, ‘What can you do?’ He said, ‘I’ll paint it black.’ I said, ‘That’s nice,’” Trump related.
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The president said the representative even offered to paint the White House and Trump’s signature on it “in gold, almost real gold, not bad.”
After relating the story, Trump noted, “By the way, this was not staged.”
“I just saw the pen sit there; I thought that this is an example of how $25 million spent by me at the Federal Reserve building would be a better job than the $4 billion that they’re spending.”
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