I. The return of authoritarian aesthetics<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump, returning to a plan he first advanced in 2020 and which was later rescinded by Joe Biden, has again taken personal control over architectural design for federal projects in Washington D.C. and throughout the country. Trump\u2019s new Executive Order,\u00a0\u201cMaking Federal Architecture Beautiful Again\u201d (signed August 28), imposes authoritarian aesthetics for buildings, codifies kitsch and signals a broader assault on cultural freedom.<\/p>\n
Trump has proposed a new White House ballroom of 90,000 sf with estimated construction cost of $200 million that will be the largest addition ever constructed and dwarf the existing complex of roughly 50,000 sf. <\/p>\n
Spuriously invoking the roles of Washington and Jefferson in designing the Capitol and White House, Trump asserts that monumental, classical forms are the only legitimate style for government buildings.\u00a0\u201cIn the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture,\u201d the Order declares.<\/p>\n
Justin Shubow, Trump ally and head of the National Civic Art Society, helped draft the document. Standing on the National Mall, Shubow proclaimed:\u00a0\u201cThis is a city inspired by Ancient Rome\u2014meant to be a new Rome\u2014a timeless republic that will never die.\u201d His language echoes Hitler\u2019s dream of a Thousand-Year Reich.<\/p>\n
The F\u00fchrerprinzip\u2014the Nazi\u00a0\u201cleader principle,\u201d where all decisions flowed from an infallible ruler\u2014applied not only to politics but also to culture and architecture. Trump\u2019s decree operates on the same logic: the state dictates what is beautiful, permissible and legitimate.<\/p>\n
The precedent is unmistakable. Hitler and his chosen architect, Albert Speer, mandated monumental classicism while denouncing modernism as\u00a0\u201cdegenerate.\u201d Trump\u2019s order, dressed up as patriotism, channels the same authoritarian impulse: uniformity imposed from\u00a0above, art stripped of critique, and culture reduced to propaganda.<\/p>\n
In any case, Trump\u2019s order has nothing to do with genuine \u201cclassicism,\u201d or a reversion to the Georgian and Federal architecture of the 18th\u00a0and early 19th\u00a0centuries. Those styles were distinguished by simplicity, balanced proportion and deliberately based themselves on the Enlightenment principles of reason, clarity and order, as well as ideals derived from ancient Greece and Rome.<\/p>\n
The Trump version has as much in common with the beauty and elegance of classical architecture as the Venetian Las Vegas, with its absurd reproductions of the Rialto Bridge, the Doge\u2019s Palace and the Grand Canal, has with the actual \u201cCity of Canals.\u201d The Trump administration, complete with anti-science fanatics and Christian-nationalist Nazis, is incapable of organizing anything in the field of architecture but pastiche, unintentional parody and \u201cmega-galactic kitsch\u201d (the phrase used for the Las Vegas version of Venice by a former mayor of the Italian city).<\/p>\n
II. Trump\u2019s cultural offensive<\/p>\n
The executive order must be placed within Trump\u2019s broader cultural offensive. His hostility to the arts and honest artists has been consistent and deliberate.<\/p>\n
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington became an early target. When Congress allocated emergency funding during the pandemic, Trump denounced the money as wasteful. The sums were trivial compared to corporate bailouts, but the message was clear: culture is an enemy, a parasite, undeserving of public support.<\/p>\n
The Smithsonian Institution likewise drew Trump\u2019s ire. He attacked exhibitions addressing racism and inequality, denouncing them as\u00a0\u201ctoxic propaganda.\u201d He opposed efforts to tell America\u2019s history from the standpoint of the oppressed, insisting instead on a sanitized, \u201cpatriotic\u201d nationalism.<\/p>\n
Every Trump budget proposal included the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, agencies whose combined budgets are less than the cost of a single fighter jet. Public broadcasting, from NPR to PBS, has been defunded. Institutions that bring culture and education to millions have been treated as subversive.<\/p>\n
By contrast, Trump poured energy into projects of nationalist spectacle. He has called for the building of a \u201cNational Garden of American Heroes,\u201d part of his preparations for the 250th anniversary of US independence in 2026. Statues of generals and businessmen and right-wing economists, not independent art, were to embody the national spirit.<\/p>\n
The pattern is unmistakable: starve culture, suppress critique and redirect funds to propaganda. Trump wants art that is patriotic, toothless, and banal\u2014\u201cbeautiful\u201d in the sense that it flatters the state and comforts the billionaire at the gala.<\/p>\n
III. Lessons of the Nazi experience<\/p>\n
The comparison with Nazi Germany is not rhetorical excess. It is a historical warning.<\/p>\n
From 1933 onward, Hitler\u2019s regime sought total control of culture. The Reich Chamber of Culture dictated who could work. Modernist art was ridiculed in the 1937 \u201cDegenerate Art\u201d exhibition before facing destruction. Meanwhile, heroic paintings of farmers and soldiers were mass-produced to glorify the state.<\/p>\n
Architecture was central. Hitler believed monumental classical forms would project the eternity of the Reich. Albert Speer\u2019s megalomaniac designs for Berlin\u2014colossal domes, triumphal arches\u2014were conceived to overwhelm individuals and convey obedience.<\/p>\n
Albert Speer during a visit to a munitions factory in May 1944<\/p>\n
The cultural result was banality. While the Nazis exalted their kitsch as eternal art, it is remembered today only as propaganda. The real legacy belongs to those they tried to silence: Klee, Kandinsky, Brecht, Mann\u2014artists whose work challenged power and exposed truth.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s decree echoes this history. It designates one style as legitimate and all others as suspect. It subordinates architecture to conformist bourgeois ideology. It arrives amid a crisis of capitalism, in which the ruling elite, unable to address inequality and every other burning social problem, is hurtling toward authoritarianism.<\/p>\n
For those in power, critical art is intolerable. It inevitably raises questions about war, poverty, exploitation and the unity of workers worldwide\u2014Rivera\u2019s industrial frescos and Picasso\u2019s Guernica, for example. Hence, in\u00a0\u201cdangerous\u201d art, the elite sees not creativity but threat. Trump\u2019s order expresses this hostility in architectural form but reflects a broader campaign to suffocate culture.<\/p>\n
IV. The oligarchy\u2019s Idea of\u00a0\u201cbeauty\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s aesthetics cannot be separated from his class position. For the oligarchy, beauty is ornamentation to proclaim and justify wealth and power: marble facades, gilded interiors, monumental statues. These are not simply matters of taste, but ideological weapons.<\/p>\n
Critical art\u2014whether socially conscious novels, modernist experimentation or architecture designed for human needs\u2014challenges this order. It exposes exploitation, provokes thought and stirs resistance. That is why such art is derided as\u00a0\u201cugly,\u201d \u201celitist\u201d or\u00a0\u201cdegenerate.\u201d<\/p>\n