The Oval Office meeting of Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele on Monday was a grotesque spectacle. Both men, elected to lead nominally democratic countries, have described themselves as dictators, and they exuded that sense of smug impunity. While reporters sought answers on the fate of Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old father of three who was wrongly deported to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot mega-prison, Trump and Bukele disclaimed responsibility, joked about further deportations, and engaged in casual slander of Ábrego García, who is not, and has never been alleged to be, a terrorist.
And then there was the gold. So much gold.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has applied gilt to the Oval Office with the same light touch that he brings to the caps lock key, which is to say, it’s everywhere. Gold knickknacks cover every surface in the Oval Office while gold-framed paintings climb the walls. Trump has added gold highlighting to the room’s ornamental moulding, imported gold cherubs from Mar-a-Lago, crowded the mantelpiece with gold urns, and even affixed what I can only describe as gold filigree doodads to the walls and fireplace. (These ornaments were made by John Icart, a south Florida cabinetmaker, according to the Wall Street Journal, though it’s possible to find a close replica on Alibaba for $1-5 a pop, pre-tariff.) He even has a gold seal on the button on his desk he presses to summon an aide with a Diet Coke.
Trump’s penchant for the gaudy has long drawn jeers – the Washington Post critic-at-large Robin Givhan wrote that the redecorated Oval Office “now evokes insecurity and petulance” – but as with so many of Trump’s buffoonish tendencies, there is a real menace beneath the shiny surface.
Those tacky antique decorative urns were gilded using ormolu, according to Givhan, a technique involving mercury that was so toxic that its practitioners rarely lived past 40. And while ormolu was banned by the French government in 1830, gold mining remains a major source of pollution, accounting for 38% of global anthropogenic mercury emissions, as well as copious amounts of cyanide and arsenic, with serious consequences for human and environmental health. Scientists estimate that more than 100 million people worldwide suffer chronic mercury poisoning, either because they are themselves miners or they live in a community affected by mining.
That’s no secret to the people of El Salvador, who made history in 2017 by becoming the first country in the world to ban the mining of metals. The ban followed years of campaigning by environmental and Indigenous activists fighting back against the international companies that have for so long extracted mineral wealth from Latin America while leaving little behind but polluted waterways and impoverished communities. The European appetite for the western hemisphere’s precious metals fueled centuries of slaughter of Indigenous populations and enormous environmental destruction; great wealth was extracted, but rarely was it shared with the local communities.
Bukele rose to power in El Salvador in 2019 with promises of an entirely different kind of mining – of cryptocurrency, rather than metals. But the 2023 prosecution of five key activists behind the mining ban on decades-old, trumped-up charges led to suspicions, since confirmed, that he was planning to reverse course.
In late 2024, Bukele came out against the ban, claiming that El Salvador had untapped gold reserves worth $3tn. The self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” soon had his wish made manifest by a compliant congress, and El Salvador’s historic ban is no more. While Bukele claims that future gold mining will be mercury-free and “sustainable”, environmental activists are getting ready to fight to save El Salvador’s waterways.
Whether that $3tn of gold will ever materialize is very much in question. Open pit mining involves the production of just over four metric tons of waste, much of which is toxic, to find a single gram of gold, according to Stephen Lezak, a researcher at the University of Oxford and author of a recent paper, The Case Against Gold Mining.
“If you run any kind of holistic cost-benefit analysis, I don’t think you can justify it,” Lezak says. “Gold mining is just as destructive as coal mining, and unlike coal, can’t heat a home or fuel a power station.” Lezak says that he supports mining minerals that are crucial to the energy transition – such as copper, nickel and lithium – but the fact that only 7% of gold is used for technology or medicine (as opposed to jewelry or stores of wealth) makes the environmental damage and risk to health too costly to bear.
But that’s the thing about gold. The human desire for its sparkle has never been a question of need, only want. The violence and displacement, suffering and grief that have accompanied the quest for gold have not yet managed to turn our eyes away from its gleam. In that way, it’s a perfect emblem for Trump – garish, useless, drenched in blood.
“The president’s fascination with gold is part of a timeless tradition of human’s liking shiny objects,” Lezak says. “You can tell the story of a lot of human history as a story of men in power wanting shiny objects, whether it’s the Spanish looking for silver in the Andes or European Americans looking for gold in California and Alaska.
“History does not look back favorably on those leaders,” he added. “I wish the president had a little more perspective.”
