While the original architect of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding ballroom steps down and preservationists panic over the fate of New Deal murals inside the Social Security Administration building, the president gushes about painting the granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, “fixing” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and erecting his own Arc de Triomphe.

To peruse the plans for a Trump-era capital district alongside the General Services Administration’s list of assets identified for accelerated disposition – the federal buildings slated for offloading – is to discern a diagram of Trump’s values.

Like all fascists’ aesthetics, Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized “classical” age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold. Everything that does not fit this vision must be renovated, razed or sold to the highest bidder.

In March, the General Services Administration published a list of 443 properties it wanted to dump. A day later, bad press – or as the GSA put it, “overwhelming response” – moved the agency to reduce the number to 320 and a day later, to take the list down altogether. It’s back again, with 45 properties and no stampede at the door. Oddly, nobody wants a courthouse in Medford, Oregon.

Many of the buildings, like the brick and concrete Coast Guard headquarters in Boston or the monolithic William O Lipinski federal building in Chicago, are unremarkable.

There are

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