On February 4, 2020, the Architectural Record reported that it had obtained a draft copy of a proposed executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The order would, essentially, force a rewrite of the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which mandated that “an official [architectural] style must be avoided” for federal buildings and that new buildings should be exemplary of the time in which they are built. The proposition put forth by this new executive order—which is spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society, a conservative nonprofit—would essentially scrap the old guidelines in favor of a mandate that establishes a “classical style” inspired by Greek and Roman architecture as the default.

The American Institute of Architects—along with several other institutions, architecture critics, and publications—swiftly published vehement denunciations to this plan, on the grounds that it would stifle architecture and violate the free thought and artistic expression that are essential to a democracy. Comparisons have already been made to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Everyone is very mad online, except for Ross Douthat, who loves the idea.

The abrupt aesthetic reversal heralded by this executive order has some obvious underpinnings, beginning with the fact that the reversion to a mandatory classical style reflects the architectural philosophies of white supremacists online, as well as the doings of a developer-president and a right-wing think tank making what is explicitly a political move. But this is also the inevitable result of an architectural faux-populism that has been sown in the conscience of American architecture since postmodernism.

The effort to stifle aesthetic expression in public architecture by instating a mandatory style is wrong for all the reasons the AIA and the Chicago Sun Times editorial board lay out in opposition. The proposal would allow Trump to create a “President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture,” which would enforce this design mandate, and this panel would exclude “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization” involved in architecture. Speaking as an architecture critic, this is insane and borderline totalitarian. But as with all the insane and borderline-totalitarian things Trump does, it can be partially explained by the man himself.

Trump’s personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating.

Whether we like to admit it or not, Trump is an architectural president—in his professional life as a (failing) developer, he has had his grubby, tiny hands in myriad buildings across the country. Like all building-peddlers, Trump is subjected to the gaze of architecture critics, who have on occasion praised his work but have most often panned it. Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from nineteenth-century retrofits to late-modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating. His choice of modernism for the style of the Trump Towers in Chicago and New York can simply be explained away by the fact that modern, all-glass buildings are the hegemonic aesthetic signature of corporate capitalism: It is the style of big business.