The president’s move is less an example of American exceptionalism than part of a familiar pattern
Amid all the horrors of the second Trump administration, the demolition of the East Wing is hardly in the top 10. But it provides a powerful symbol of wanton destruction – and, as Trump himself knows full well, images matter greatly in politics. It also curiously combines so many elements of a distinctly Trumpian approach to government: shameless falsehoods about the proposed ballroom (“It won’t interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it”); complete disregard for legislation (in this case rules about preservation), and unprecedented levels of cronyism (with CEOs trying to curry favor with the president through donations to a grotesque project of self-aggrandizement). There is also something very poignant about the destruction of an edifice which had provided an office of one’s own for first ladies. For all these peculiarities, Trump’s disfiguring the White House fits into a larger global trend: far-right populist leaders in many countries have used spectacular architecture to advance their political agenda and, more particularly, to set their vision of a “real people” – as in “real Americans”, “real Hungarians” et cetera – in stone.
Just before Christmas 2020, in the dying days of his first administration, Trump had already taken time off from his busy schedule promoting the big lie about having won the election in order to issue an executive order entitled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. The order made “classicism” the preferred style for new federal buildings, stopping just short of banning modernism entirely. Biden rescinded the order; Trump brought a version of it back right on inauguration day this year. What is almost entirely forgotten is that the 2020 order had belonged together with Trump’s “1776 commission”, the ill-fated attempt to whitewash US history; both the architecture orders and the instructions for history teaching were meant to promote an image of the US as pure and “beautiful”.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
