Maybe Trump Is Giving Us the Capital City We Deserve |
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Under Donald Trump, the nation’s capital is getting a face-lift. The president has torn down the White House’s decades-old East Wing to make room for a massive ballroom that could end up costing taxpayers $1 billion or more. He ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to be painted blue. He covered the Oval Office with golden tchotchkes, redid the Lincoln bathroom in marble, paved the Kennedy-era Rose Garden into a patio, and resurfaced a White House walkway with black granite sourced from Africa and carved in Italy (so much for America First). In some cases, the attempts to remake the city in Trump’s image have been literal; the neoclassical facades of the Justice Department and other federal buildings now feature giant banners of the president’s scowling visage.
He isn’t done either. Trump also wants to build a triumphal arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery that would dwarf similar monuments in Paris and Rome. He has pledged to redevelop a swath of the National Mall into a “National Garden of American Heroes” that could reportedly feature dining facilities, an amphitheater, and hundreds of statues of famous Americans. On Thursday, his administration unveiled plans to transform one of the capital’s unassuming municipal golf courses into a luxe, 18-hole expanse that could someday host major tournaments.
The president’s vision of a revamped Washington has inspired a steady stream of opprobrium from political opponents, experts, and aesthetes. Many of them note that Trump’s design sensibilities would run roughshod over a capital city that was purposely engineered to embody democratic values. His proposed ballroom “represents another way this presidency has abandoned its imperative of projecting modesty, openness, and stability,” the architect and historian Neil Flanagan complained in the Atlantic this month. “It should reflect American values: hard work, humble beginnings, doing right by your neighbor,” the interior designer Annie Elliott told HuffPost. “The sterile white ballroom, with its 40-foot ceilings, gilded chandeliers, and sky-high windows, conveys none of that.” Trump’s arch, groused the New York Times, “would drastically change the sightlines between some of the country’s most symbolic memorials.” Writing in Air Mail, the Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger called both designs “a desecration” of “the high aims of classical architecture.” Polls suggest that those critics’ reservations are widely shared. A Washington Post survey last month found public support for the ballroom running 2-to-1 against.
But if Washington is a city of national symbols, it’s hard to think of a more fitting monument to Trumpism than a tawdry ballroom, an oversized arch, and a terrace fit for Mar-a-Lago. To cast Trump’s overhauls as a perversion of the capital’s carefully calibrated architectural homages to democracy is to be living in the past. We’re talking, after all, about a man who rode a gilded escalator into the annals of American history, whose movement has been the dominant force in our politics for the past decade, and who, when asked last year whom his proposed triumphal arch was for, pointed at himself and said, “Me.” Plenty of previous presidents have left their mark on the city in ways that........