History has shown us how much dictators and aspiring dictators love building monuments to themselves. They enjoy reminding the world that they can do anything, no matter who is responsible for the physical labor or who will be paying the financial and human cost.

They prefer outsized structures, heroic arches, towers and columns designed to prove that their signature and their esthetic will be with us forever, even after they’re dead, though dictators often seem to believe they are too powerful to die.

There’s a chilling photograph of Hitler in the bunker beneath Berlin, soon after the allied victory and not long before his suicide, contemplating an architectural model of the Austrian city of Linz which he had intended (and perhaps still intended) to rebuild to his specifications.

In Tirana, Albania, is a bizarre glass pyramid that the tyrant Enver Hoxha constructed as a museum about his life, and in which he is now buried. In Rome’s EUR, Mussolini and his city planners designed a neighborhood scaled for the race of Fascist giants to which they imagined they belonged.

So it comes as no surprise that Donald Trump has invested so much energy, sacrificed so much popular goodwill, and already spent a fortune on the East Wing ballroom, a project that will occupy an astonishing 90,000 square feet.

I can’t have been the only person who was shocked and saddened by photos of the jagged, gaping hole in the White House’s east facade, ripped apart by a wrecking crew, and by pictures of the historic rose garden remade........

© The Guardian