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How Trump Got His Tacky Arch Approved

Neoclassical revivalists had to sell their souls.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shows an artist’s rendering of the arch.

One of the less remarked upon reverberations of Trump’s disastrous rule of this country is that he has turned its architectural critics into exegetes of his sleazy plans for Washington, DC’s built environment. Instead of writing about the burgeoning (and often life-affirming) shifts in today’s architectural culture—from adaptive reuse to beautiful, functional affordable housing—we critics keep getting yanked back into the slopworld of ballrooms, arches, and faux gold leaf.

It goes without saying that the proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch (one foot for every year the United States has existed!) is absurd and tacky. Modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it boasts gaudy gilded lettering and a 80-foot cake-topper statue—Trump can’t help but cheat, even on the height of his own precious arch. His McMansionized conception of what is monumental and “historic” is, much like his culinary penchant for McDonald’s itself, one of his most idiosyncratic qualities.

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The motivations behind Trump’s building frenzy are not exactly mysterious. “We’re building a valuable piece of real estate right back here,” he told attendees of an Easter lunch, gesturing to construction work on his infamous ballroom. “It’s going to be amazing.” Referring to the White House as “real estate” is a bit of parapraxis, letting slip that the executive branch, in more ways than one, is indeed for sale. He is also jonesing to build a kind of knock-off One World Trade Center (but this time, of course, with a hotel) as his presidential library (perfect for a man who probably hasn’t read a book in 30 years), driving home that he is, above all, a developer at heart. His understanding of power derives from this fundamental belief that to control the land is to control the world.

As a true son of the 1980s, he believes in spectacle over quality. Arches, ballrooms, even queues for the White House, as though it were the FastTrack lane at Disney........

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