I have been thinking about this for a while and considering writing about it myself but this piece by Nikki McCann Ramirez of Rolling Stone does a wonderful job of it. She takes a look at the reasons why this gaudy, ersatz Versailles that Trump is building is such an anathema to our founding principles. Washington D.C. was designed explicitly as a rejection of that opulent, monarchial style.
She starts out talking about how after WWII there was a ton of renovation being done and a lot of buildings were being torn down in the Capitol. We’d had more than a decade of depression and war and people wanted to rebuild. But as she says, they were risking erasing the “specific intent” of the Capitol buildings and memorials: “to transfer the philosophical principles of the American Revolution into the physical cityscape that would represent the American seat of governance.”
She speaks about Jacqueline Kennedy’s project to renovate the White House as an answer to that. It was a huge deal with a massive audience that tuned into her television special which brought the country into the White House to see it and understand the history that was being preserved.
That’s the opposite of what’s happening now:
She sought to turn the presidential residence into a living museum through open collaboration with the public. Now, over 60 years since the Kennedys left the White House, the president is undertaking an architectural and aesthetic overhaul of not just the White House, but the city at large. The difference is that Donald Trump, a man who struggles to comprehend even the most basic tenants of representative governance, is looking to reshape Washington in his own gaudy, opulent self image — not that of the nation he is supposed to represent.
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“He’s doing all this without review. It’s just spur of the moment, ‘What do I feel like today?’ And then he does it. And if we could just get him to pause and think about what it is he’s doing and the effects of that, I think this would go a long way,” Alison Hoagland, architectural historian and a trustee at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, tells Rolling Stone, giving the ballroom as an example. In the neoclassical style, “symmetry and hierarchy are very important.”
“The White House should always be the most important building on its site, building a ballroom three times the size of the White House is not going to let that happen,” she explains. “It’s going to take the eye, the weight of everything, all the attention off of the White House, which is this jewel in the center of the space, and push it over towards this oversized ballroom.”
The White House is one of the focal points in the physical layout of Washington, D.C., a city that was planned virtually from the ground up in the span of a few decades on the banks of the Potomac River. “It’s unique. It is a planned world capital, and it reflects democracy in the way that it’s laid out,” Hoagland adds. The original designer of the city, Pierre L’Enfant, “was very conscious of the vistas” and connected “certain sites, like the White House of the Capitol.”
L’Enfant put the Capitol on the largest hill near the Potomac River, and put the White House on another hill in order to create “a reciprocal view between them,” as Hoagland explains of the two buildings at the heart of the National Mall. She adds that the White House was intentionally designed as “a very domestic kind of building. It is not a palace — it’s bigger than probably your house or my house — but it’s sort of cloven to a country gentleman’s townhouse of the time.”
The White House, designed in a neoclassical style, is not overly ornamented, but rather restrained and dignified in its visual aspects — down to its color. The design was selected via an anonymous public competition, and George Washington lopped a whole floor off of the selected design to save money. A proposal for a significantly smaller structure submitted by future President Thomas Jefferson was rejected, but his insistence that the residence be styled a presidential “house” and not a presidential “palace” — as is still customary in many nations — stuck. Though the building shies away from the opulence expected of European rulers and monarchy, Jefferson would still go on to complain that it was still “big enough for two emperors, one pope, and the grand lama in the bargain.”
The Capitol is a “completely different building, and that is very deliberate” Hoagland says, noting that the imposing, ornate structure of the legislative building was placed in dominant physical dialogue with the executive residence as a reminder of which branch of government was supposed to loom largest — even though much our modern elected officials have seemingly forgotten.
That sort of intentionality is visible throughout Washington, D.C., although the casual tourist might not even realize it. To this day, buildings in the city do not surpass the height of the Capitol dome, meaning that any resident or visitor of the city is treated to a spectacular view of the major landmarks of the republic from virtually any moderately well placed rooftop. Even the times of greatest physical peril for the integrity of the United States are referenced in the landscape. Lincoln stares out towards the Washington Monument and the Capitol from his memorial, which is connected via a physical and metaphorical bridge over the Potomac River to Arlington Cemetery and the Robert E. Lee Mansion — the home of his Southern foe during the Civil War. The memorial was built as a visual reminder of the reunification between the North and South.
Trump does not understand America, its history or what ideals and principles it was founded on. He’s too dim to even be able to comprehend it. And even if he did, he doesn’t think they are worth anything because his only principle is “might makes right” and “my way or the highway.”
It’s astonishing how blatantly he’s revealing himself in this second term. Nobody voted for this bullshit and Americans certainly are not clamoring for it. It’s all for him, to leave his mark on the country in ways that he believes are enduring. But instead of some real achievements he just wants to bully the Nobel Committee into giving him the prize based on lies, turn Washington into a Trump theme park and plaster his name all over everything. His megalomania makes him believe that if he just wishes something it will be true, like “winning” the Iran war when all he’s done is help destabilize the world.
The phony “Trump” Mark Burnett created with the Apprentice is completely gone now. All that’s left of those who once bought into the lie is blind loyalty and an inability to admit they wrong — and a willingness to deny what they see with their own eyes. That’s between 30 and 35% of the country. Everyone else sees through him. Unfortunately, among those who are still onboard this tragic journey with him are the ones who only see their own opportunities to profit from the chaos and they are the ones who could stop him
He’s destroying the symbols of America that form the ideals to which we all used to at least aspire. It’s an open question if he will actually destroy the country as well in the process.