Unrepublican Architecture
Donald Trump began his second presidential term — Vanity Drain Unplugged, if you will — by gilding the Oval Office in a manner suggestive of a set for an off-Broadway show titled “Liberace: A Musical Fantasy!” He staged a Mussolini-esque military parade for which even most of his MAGA cult were too embarrassed to show up, an old pro-American habit of mind temporarily subduing their usual blind obedience to their fetishized despot-without-portfolio. And now, fresh on the heels of his (superfluous) Alaskan submission to the real MAGA leader, Vladimir Putin — think of how you felt as a child watching The Empire Strikes Back, when you were shown for the first time that Darth Vader, the dark lord himself, was merely the obedient servant of a much more powerful master — Trump’s press secretary has announced the start of work on a new two hundred million dollar ballroom in the White House.
Each of these three largely symbolic excesses — the gold glitz transforming the people’s office into a gawdy presidential palace, the military parade framed as a show of the president’s personal power, and the dislocation of the traditional East Wing offices of the White House in favor of a giant ballroom designed in the typically Trumpian style of nouveau riche classlessness — exemplifies in a manner that is as laughable as it is telling just how thoroughly un-American, and particularly anti-republican Trump is, in his instincts and sensibility.
The most noteworthy characteristic of Washington’s most important government buildings, its main seats of power, is — or at least was before Trump — precisely their lack of gawdiness, their relative austerity, and, beyond the sheer scale and attractiveness of the architecture, their essential eschewing of ostentation. This simplicity, when compared with most other nations’ houses of government, a simplicity which has been more or less respectfully maintained for the almost two and a half centuries of America’s existence, bespeaks no dearth of national imagination or style. Quite the contrary, it indicates, gloriously, the definitional distinction between this great world-historical nation and all previous (or present) ones, namely that in The United States of America, the president and the congress were never supposed to be perceived and aggrandized, let alone to view themselves, as the rulers, but merely as temporary representatives of the people at large, with no higher status under the law than any far-flung farmer or factory worker, no special claims to innate moral superiority deserving of parades in their honor or the bowing of other men’s heads, no pretense of divine dispensation warranting pomp and circumstance for the sake of these men who, both by nature and by law, must and will retire from these buildings and return to the midst of their former neighbors, those very same farmers and factory workers from whose towns and villages these representatives once came to Washington, by the will and free choice of those neighbors, their equals, to fulfill a personal calling to public service (not rule), i.e., to do for their fellow citizens a duty which those fellows, in principle, might just as well have done for them, and may well do for them later.
During the long history of those great and symbolic buildings, there have indeed been gradual changes in the direction of immodesty and unnecessary grandeur, proceeding alongside the changing self-perception of the elected inhabitants themselves (though less rapidly), and thus symbolizing the evolving, or rather devolving, relationship between the U. S. federal government and the American people, as the nation has gradually lost its moorings in the natural rights and limited government premises of its founding. It is significant and representative of such changes, for example, that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt — prior to Trump one of the White House occupants with the most untethered sense of executive privilege — who ordered the Oval Office, the president’s personal place of governance, to be expanded and “enhanced” to its present form, including the addition of the presidential seal medallion on the ceiling, which, if one thinks about it, is very much of the spirit of hanging a giant portrait of oneself on one’s own wall, or in current terms, covering one’s refrigerator or smartphone screen with selfies. Nevertheless, some measure of measure remained intact through all the gradual and inevitable renovations. Today, however, all the dogs of presidential vainglory and palatial grandiosity (vulgarian version) have been loosed at last, as Trump, unburdened by any remnants of “deep state” sobriety in his second administration, feeds his ego and his craving for a legacy in the Trumpian manner, which is to say with a quasi-Napoleonic obsession with imperial license, public adoration, grovelling gratitude, and a deep-seated belief in the world-historical importance and indubitability of himself.
Is it any wonder that such a man, his mental and practical tethers severed at last, should seek to turn the Oval Office into a golden throne room, and the East Wing, hitherto the home of various functional offices including those of the First Lady, into a gawdily ornate and ceremonial “grandest ever” grand ballroom worthy of Tzarist Russia? As though the image America ought to present to foreign dignitaries were not, as had formerly been the case, one of intransigent republicanism, of government as the humble servant of the people who elect it — the very antithesis of the divinely anointed superior being that the old world kings and ruling elites imagined themselves to be — but now rather an image of an America whose preeminence and historical importance lay in her ruling elite’s capacity to outdo the old world’s emperors and despots in self-aggrandizing splendour. In other words, America as conceived and founded, and as embodied in her halls of government, was supposed to demonstrate her superiority not in material extravagance but in moral virtue; not in the luxurious display of her “rulers” but in the natural equality of her private citizenry (from whom the elected leaders were chosen and to whom they were, in principle, no better or different); not through a government of endless wealth and public show, but through the practical, visible manifestations of limited government, of power constrained by law and decency, and deferential to the primacy of the private individual.
Trump sees himself as the unique, indispensable, and entitled ruler of a country whose government, including its presidency, was intended to be the owned and operated instrument of the common citizenry, rather than an object of submission or awe in the eyes of that citizenry, or of dubious admiration in the eyes of the outside world’s representatives of unlimited government, to whose claims of ultimate authority over their people the United States of America was founded to be the antithesis and antidote, and to whose demeaned citizens the U.S. long stood as a beacon of hope, a living model of the modern ascension of the private individual, which is to say the diminution and de-mythologizing of “the rulers.” Trump, understanding none of this, disrespects these principles — the basic premises of constitutional republicanism or classical liberalism — to the core of his non-being. His “big ideas” for reforming the outward presentation and purpose of American government (which, like all else that he deems worthy of attention, he identifies with himself), perfectly symbolized by his military parade, his grand ballroom, and his golden office, show him to be unworthy of the office he occupies to an unprecedented degree. He is as unrepublican and hence anti-American as any of the self-aggrandizing tyrants and thugs he so admires, which is why he admires them and therefore wishes to transform the American presidency (i.e., his rule) into something resembling theirs, rather than standing like a man against the false allure of vainglorious and individual-smothering power gestures, as America’s presidents were supposed to do, and often actually did in practice, until recently.
