There’s a new way to tell who actually holds Donald Trump‘s confidence in his circle. It isn’t a title, a badge, or an office with a view of the Rose Garden. It’s what’s on the wrist.
A small circle of the administration’s most powerful people have been photographed wearing the exact same watch. It has the same blue dial, same glint of gold, same tiny detail almost nobody outside the building would ever catch. But it isn’t sold in a store and it can’t simply be ordered.
In a White House that has spent this term coating the capital in gold while everyone else stares down a grocery bill, the price is the part that lands the hardest.
Vanity Fair reported on Friday, Sept. 18, that the ultimate marker of inner-circle standing in Trump’s second term is a custom Rolex, known around town as the “White House Rolex.” It comes in two designs: a gold Day-Date Presidential, or a GMT with the red-and-blue “Pepsi” bezel.
Both carry a blue face and a gold presidential seal on the dial. When taking a closer look, there’s a star reportedly sitting at the 45-second marker and another at 47, which is a nod to Trump serving as the 45th and 47th president. Then, when you flip it over, the watch has the White House engraved on the back.
It’s worth pointing out that Rolex doesn’t make custom watches. So these are bought new, then sent to a bespoke workshop in London to be pulled apart and rebuilt to order.
An uncustomized gold Day-Date retails north of $50,000 before anyone touches the dial, according to The Daily Beast, and that’s the starting point.
“There’s no one f—ing rich enough in the West Wing to actually buy the watch,” one insider told Vanity Fair in what perhaps was intended to be an ironic statement about a notably high-net-worth administration.
The reported owners include billionaire special envoy Steve Witkoff, chief of staff Susie Wiles and White House counsel Will Scharf, plus Vice President JD Vance’s chief of staff Nick Luna and national security adviser Cliff Sims. Outside the building, 2024 campaign manager Chris LaCivita and Trump’s personal pollster Tony Fabrizio are said to be in the club too.
And no, these weren’t handed out. Unlike the matching dress shoes Trump has been buying for the men around him, staffers are reportedly spending their own thousands to get one.
Online, people cared less about the watches and more about the math.
“Buying diesel fuel is our new status symbol,” one Facebook user wrote.
“He’s robbing you blind,” another wrote with laughing emojis.
“He wants the Rolex to be the New DC status symbol… meanwhile the rest of us are wearing Timex,” one user added.
Some got sharper with their comments. “They are set to stop working the day after the midterms,” one joked. Another went after Trump’s own merchandise line: “I wonder if the R will fall off on the Rolex wording like the T did in the Trump series watches.”
On Threads, a commenter who appeared to know the market did the math out loud, noting that a watch like that isn’t sold to walk-ins and that a custom dial pushes it well above “50k or more.”
For those in Trump’s team who can’t clear that bar, the report adds that there’s a consolation prize, consisting of gold cufflinks with the presidential seal in red, which matter because Trump gives them personally.
Eric Trump was photographed wearing a pair at Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral back in July. “Those are f—ing status symbols,” one strategist said, “because they come straight from the president himself.”
The watches sit inside a wider culture that reporting describes as openly transactional. Lobbyists allegedly rank each other by private jet, one told the magazine, and new members-only clubs in the capital charging up to $500,000 to join. This is the wealthiest administration in American history, with more than one billionaire in the Cabinet.
The status-symbol economy inside this White House isn’t anything new, though. Earlier this year, Trump made headlines for his habit of gifting his Cabinet matching $145 Florsheim dress shoes.
There’s one more irony in it. Trump sells his own watches, priced from a few hundred dollars up to a $100,000, according to CBS News, and his financial disclosures logged $4.7 million in income from the licensing deal.
The White House declined to comment to Vanity Fair.
