Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.
Art and architecture’s power is that it keeps us honest. It reflects our present and reminds future generations of what we were, whether that history was laudatory or shameful. Changes in architectural design reflect the culture and economies of the time, whether the grandiose plantations of the pre-Civil War South or cheap, high-rise tenement buildings thrown together in cities in the latter half of the 19th century to house waves of immigrant workers coming to America.
Now, the brand-happy President Donald Trump has turned the idea on its head, using architecture and art to create and even erase history. Slapping his name on buildings and government programs may look like the pathetic self-aggrandizement of a narcissist, but the long game is more insidious and troubling: Trump wants to manufacture a present that will give future generations the wrong idea that he was both beloved and all-powerful — and perhaps expand his current power in the process.
He’s put his name on “Trump Gold Cards,” which grease the residency and citizenship process for a $1 million donation to the U.S. Treasury. The Trump brand is on new tax-advantaged investment accounts for babies. He had his name etched on the U.S. Institute for Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His Interior Department is moving to put Trump’s picture on national park passes, replacing images of nature – not only erasing the crowning achievement of President Woodrow Wilson, who kicked off the effort to protect 85 million acres for people’s enjoyment, but appallingly, honoring a president who has made deep funding cuts to the parks system. A congresswoman has introduced legislation to make Trump’s birthday a national holiday, and the president has already declared that day (June 14) to be a free day at national parks.
The White House has traditionally included portraits of every U.S. president, even those who were impeached or resigned in office. In Trump’s White House, he has installed at least five, count ’em, FIVE, portraits of himself in the government building, while childishly moving President Barack Obama’s portrait to a non-public stairwell and replacing President Joe Biden’s portrait with an image of an autopen.
And Trump has used art, too, to advance an idea of America where muscled white men dominate the workforce. His Labor Department’s social media campaign features Norman Rockwell-esque images of blonde, blue-eyed young men with phrases like “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” and “Make America Skilled Again!” (One wonders if the people who chose the AI-generated images are aware that Rockwell was an ardent civil rights defender whose paintings were not only of Happy American Nuclear Families but of the harassment of Black children after school desegregation.) Even the font used by the State Department has been a target of the effort to return to an earlier “golden era,” after the Biden administration changed the official font for diplomatic communication to Calibri, so it was more readable for people with certain disabilities. The Trump State Department recently changed it back to the more staid-looking Times New Roman – for no other reason than to reject any suggestion of accessibility. Just as the Trump regime wants to avoid forward-looking and inclusive architecture, it wants to limit who can access government communication itself.
If it weren’t such a desperate and sad ploy to become, or at least appear, welcome, it’s worth remembering that Trump opened his glitzy Mar-a-Lago club after failing to win the hearts of New York City’s old-money society — it would be an alarming scheme of a wannabe dictator.
And yet, we should not so easily dismiss the long-term danger of Trump’s schlocky self-promotion. This effort is not (just) an extension of Trump’s business approach, putting his name on everything from steaks and vodka to bibles and a shuttered “university.” He’s making or proposing far more fundamental changes that threaten to undermine the very symbols of America’s fragile democracy.
The East Wing of the White House has been demolished to make way for a massive ballroom, upsetting the historic design of a building that has welcomed scores of presidential families, foreign leaders, and infamous constituents. Iconic Rose Garden events will be no more; the backyard garden with a history dating back to 1903 was paved over, Big Yellow Taxi-style, for a patio with a table and chairs that looks like it belongs at a mid-level hotel off the interstate.
And perhaps worst of all is the president’s mission of installing an “Arc de Trump,” to be situated on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge connecting Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Not only is it insulting to the French — whose historic Arc de Triomphe memorializes fallen French soldiers and houses the eternal flame for the World War II dead — but it reveals the president’s frighteningly distorted view of himself and a determination to enshrine himself and his power, permanently, in history, as the Founding Father of America’s post-democratic era.
“Trump’s breaking all the rules and the norms, and it’s worrisome. If you make a mistake in architecture, it lasts 100 years. That’s about to happen … It’s the style and behavior of dictators,” says Charles Bloszies, the award-winning, San Francisco architect, structural engineer, and author of the book Old Buildings, New Designs.
That’s literally true when it comes to Trump’s vision for government buildings. In the third executive order of its kind, the president decreed that new federal buildings be constructed in the classical style — not, as the lover of cheap-looking, imitation Versailles design sneered, structures that “impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people who the buildings are meant to serve.”
The Nazi regime embraced neoclassical design, using architecture as a weapon of control. Adolph Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, designed buildings (some for which, like his vision for a new Berlin, were never built) meant to overwhelm the people, while underscoring the power and awe of the ruling party. Hitler “liked it because it would look good in ruins,” Bloszies observes. “It was this egocentric idea, all about me, and taking over the world. That seems to be Trump’s M.O. It’s always about him and his ego.”
And yet, Trump’s quest for a lasting legacy isn’t coming with any actual creative work or innovation. Just as Trump sold the right to use his name on hotels he did not build, and now clamors for a Nobel Peace Prize more than for actual peace, he has copied others’ ideas to create a knockoff legacy.
“It’s like he’s flipping through a catalogue. It’s a very consumerist approach to everything: I buy that; I glue my name on it, and now it’s mine,” says Theo Deutinger, the Austrian architect and illustrator whose nonfiction book, Handbook of Tyranny, documents the architecture of refugee camps, prisons, slaughterhouses, and border fences. “He takes a style like the Arc de Triomphe, ready-made, [and says] let’s take that. It’s very authoritarian, and it suits him well.”
Stolen distinction, of course, is an inherent lie, and one ultimately exposed. Adding his name to the Kennedy Center does not make him equal to JFK, and the legions of performing artists who have canceled their shows in protest of Trump reveal the lie in real time. Covering nearly a third of the walls of the Oval Office in gold doesn’t make him a king. Should the plans for an “Arc de Trump” somehow get approved, it might not serve the purpose Trump hopes it will. Building monuments to himself creates a legacy he imagines for himself, one that history may not affirm. But future generations will have to live with the architectural mess he made – and the lies he sought, literally, to carve into our history.
Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.
Header image by Debbie Millman.
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