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A Capital of Trinkets

The architectural follies of Trump’s Washington, DC.

The Architectural Follies of Trump’s Washington, DC

The president plans to remake the capital in his own image, but is all he is doing destroying what’s already there?

Trump at the White House Ballroom construction site in May 2026.

I’ve long been fascinated by the monuments of totalitarianism, the building projects undertaken by men who think of themselves as the lords and masters of the countries they govern. One of my favorite examples is the Pyramid of Tirana, a particularly dismal hunk of brutalism erected in honor of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s ruler for almost 40 years. It opened in the 1980s, and its purpose was to house a museum all about… Enver Hoxha.

The fact that the United States has never been one of those countries—our presidents most emphatically do not own the house in which they reside or build monuments to themselves (with the exception of presidential libraries)—has escaped the attention of the current holder of the office, who is doing his best to remake our nation’s capital in his own garish image.

And so, during the first week of June, I rode the Acela to Washington, DC, purchased a Metro day pass, and set out to investigate the progress of Trump’s grands projets. My first destination, of course, was the Kennedy Center. After a short walk from the nearest Metro station, I found myself among a handful of tourists, all fixated on the sign on the front of the center. We were there, it appeared, for the spectacle of a current president’s name being slapped on an institution built as a memorial to a past president whose violent death was a national trauma, one still very much in living memory.

Aside from the presence of the curiosity seekers, the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts was largely dormant. The two massive corridors that run the width of the complex, the Hall of States and the Hall of Nations, were unlocked but occupied only by a handful of staffers. The Reach, a series of small, asymmetrical pavilions designed by the architect Steven Holl and opened in 2019, was a ghost town held in suspension, like the rest of the complex, by Trump’s intention to shut it all down for a two-year renovation (a plan that was blocked by a judge this past spring).

From there, I meandered over to the National Mall, where I noticed a group of workmen scrubbing the base of a statue of the mythical winged horse Pegasus accompanied by two nude male figures. An homage to the “peaceful arts,” the statue is one of four that Trump is having newly gilded with 23.75-karat gold, at a cost of $5.1 million. While the spectacle of Trump playing King Midas on our dime has become routine, I was troubled by the signs mounted on the sheds enclosing the other statue, whose Pegasus and nude figures were being patched and cleaned ahead of its regilding. “We are making DC SAFE & BEAUTIFUL,” they read, alongside the logos of the US Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and Freedom 250.

Predictably, the work being done in the name of safety and beauty has been, thus far, making the capital’s familiar landscapes arguably less safe and conspicuously........

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