Mussolini Would Have Loved Trump’s Ballroom

Mr. Goldberger is a former architecture critic for The Times and The New Yorker and the author of “Why Architecture Matters.”

President Trump’s attempt to hugely expand the White House is lumbering forward. It suffered the tiniest of setbacks when the National Capital Planning Commission decided to postpone a vote on the project to its next meeting, on April 2. But it is highly unlikely that the commission, which has been stocked with Trump appointees, will not ultimately sign off on this enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries.

At a public hearing last Thursday, Paul Ingrassia, the acting general counsel for the General Services Administration, described the ballroom as a “magnificent design.” He is not an architect or an architecture historian. He was invited to sit in on the commission’s deliberations in what appears to have been a consolation prize after reports that he had described himself in a leaked group text chat as having “a Nazi streak” derailed his appointment last year as head of the Office of Special Counsel in the White House.

Now the planning commission, like the Commission of Fine Arts, which approved the project last month, is made up of people appointed not on the basis of expertise — like the architects, planners and urban designers Mr. Trump fired to make way for them — but for their willingness to do the president’s bidding. As Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the classical architect who now heads the Commission of Fine Arts, said before it voted to approve the ballroom without even reviewing final plans, “This is an important thing to the president” that would “let the president do his job.”

Mr. Cook chose not to address the question of whether a building bigger than the presidential residence, with a ballroom that will seat about 1,000 people, the scale of an event space at a hotel catering to conventioneers, is essential for Mr. Trump or any other president to do his job. But Mr. Trump is not — has never been — much interested in doing the job of president as we constitutionally have known it. In order to be the imperial kind of president he has styled himself as, he requires imperial-style spaces. Certainly the historical White House didn’t have a throne room, much less a ballroom for his throngs of supporters and supplicants to gather. He presumably wanted it to be able to function more like Mar-a-Lago.

As with most of the destructive and divisive actions that the president has committed America to this year, it is not a solution to a real problem at all but the cover for a deeper desire, which in this case is to remake official Washington in his image. The ballroom is bombastic architecture pretending to be genteel.

It brings to mind not any previous American president but the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was obsessed with rebuilding Rome into some grand new version of itself. In 1924, two years after coming into absolute power, in a talk at the Campidoglio in the city’s historic center, he said, “It is necessary to liberate from the mediocre disfigurements of the old Rome.” He added, “Rome cannot, must not be, only a modern city in the by now banal sense of the word. It must be a city worthy of its glory.” Rome needed, he said, more grandezza — more grandeur.

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