On the scale of Trump overreach, the presidential order last week to eschew modernist architecture in favour of Greco-Roman classicism might seem small beer. “The classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for all future federal buildings, he ruled.

But the decision – which was as much political posturing as an aesthetic act, promoting a romanticised vision of ordered life in imperial Rome over post-Art Deco functionalist and minimalist design – is a significant symbol of the president’s ambition to remake the country’s political culture.

Unsurprisingly titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again, the order argues that neoclassicism reflects the founding fathers’ “self-governing ideals”, while contemporary styles such as brutalism and deconstructivism are incapable of embodying America’s “national values”.

What the billionaire developer’s own taste for garish, gilt-encrusted, dictator chic skyscrapers represents is not explained.

Like Mussolini and Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, Trump wants to enshrine classicism as a state ideology, much as he has started to rebrand the representation of history in the Smithsonian to reflect the positive aspects of a mythical American past. Or how he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for over-representing black experience, or intruded in the work of the national endowments for humanities and arts, public broadcasting, the Kennedy Center, and the Library of........

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