Donald Trump is on track to become one of our greatest builder presidents, in line with Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
His critics bemoan his bold initiatives, but Americans are embracing his classical and traditional undertakings.
The only real destruction caused by his projects is the loss of the establishment’s cultural hegemony.
The new White House State Ballroom is the latest case in point.
The left denounces the two-term president as a “king,” but his plans for the former East Wing reveal a democratic executive with the popular intelligence of a lifetime in real estate.
With funding secured by private donations made through the Trust for the National Mall, rather than by taxpayer revenue, Trump has set out to leave a lasting legacy on the White House grounds free of charge.
It turns out the art of the deal is good news for our nation’s architecture and art.
During Trump’s first term, the residential architect Steven W. Spandle updated the White House tennis pavilion.
That initiative faced its own host of critics as it replaced Barack Obama’s basketball court and changing-room trailer.
Yet the result proved to be a sensitive new addition that restored the elegance of a sport that Theodore Roosevelt first introduced to the White House.
The ballroom likewise updates the East Wing for a new and much-needed function. Its lead architect is James McCrery II, a seasoned practitioner.
A restrained, classical exterior that borrows from the White House’s existing colonnades, fanlights, cornices and stonework will open onto a more exuberant interior of Corinthian columns and coffered ceilings.
Until now, large White House receptions have been relegated to unsightly tents on the South Lawn.
The ballroom will finally provide a secure indoor venue for essential functions such as state dinners while maintaining the East Wing’s existing functions.
With a capacity approaching 1,000 guests (numbers have varied), the venue will also make the president’s home, and the president himself, more accessible to more Americans than before.
In a democratic society, such openness might be considered a good thing.
As with any reuse, the project starts with demolition.
Here few will admit the East Wing is not the historical White House at all. It is a side structure, of relatively recent vintage, set apart and built over the presidential bunker.
Before this, most of us probably needed a map to find it on the executive grounds.
Such an architectural update does not represent a tear in the essential fabric of our democratic republic.
For more than a century, the White House’s nerve center has been the West Wing, not the East Wing.
First designed under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, the West Wing allowed the executive staff to work outside the White House’s second-floor living quarters for the first time. William Howard Taft added the Oval Office to the West Wing soon after.
The East Wing has been far less significant to the history of the White House, serving as a coatroom, a reception hall and most recently the first lady’s offices.
Regardless of any section’s particular significance, however, every president has updated the White House.
Critics complained about Jefferson’s additions, too, but presidents have wide latitude in overseeing changes at the White House and even a duty to keep the executive mansion updated and vital.
The White House outbuildings have evolved even more over time, with greenhouses, swimming pools, bowling alleys and movie theaters coming and going.
Under Harry Truman’s presidency, the White House was even gutted, with bulldozers rolling through the empty shell of the historical structure.
Just imagine the outcry if Trump had sent bulldozers through the Lincoln Bedroom.
We should not be surprised by the political capital that Trump is now spending on cultural projects or his understanding of the transformative power of architecture and art.
Through his career in real estate, he early on learned the power of the wrecking ball in getting things done.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he made his mark through the brash development of Midtown’s Grand Hyatt New York and his Trump Tower at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue. Both involved the construction of glass towers through the partial or full demolition of historical structures.
We might rightly criticize the loss of architectural history replaced by smoked windows and bronze cladding, but Trump demonstrated what it took to build successful projects in what at the time appeared to be a moribund city.
His sense of style has also evolved since then into a more nuanced appreciation of classicism and historical preservation. Following his 1985 purchase of Mar-a-Lago, he restored that derelict Palm Beach residence to its original splendor.
At the heart of Trump’s appeal has been the promise of restoration: the “again” of “Make America Great Again.”
What began as a return to American values is now compounded by his own return to power after a Herculean campaign and the prospect of the US semiquincentennial in 2026.
Trump also witnessed what was nothing less than an attempted revolution to overturn the American order in the summer of 2020.
Genuine insurrectionists intermingled with criminals and permissive gatekeepers to target not just statues of American heroes and history but also the classical plinths and pillars representing our national foundations.
The president is ever mindful of the history of radicalism and the capacity of classicism to signal a return to order. In his second term, this embrace has been unabashed.
His classical eclecticism is gilded, colorful and light-filled. He has promoted shovel-ready projects with a hard deadline of July 4, 2026, the date of the national jubilee.
Trump has also pushed new design guidance, in particular the classical mandate behind the executive order “Making Federal Architecture Great Again.” The order overturns 60 years of Olympian modernism enforced as house style that has seen increasingly oppressive results.
Trump’s executive order has far-reaching consequences and is being extended to infrastructure projects and other sectors under federal purview.
Now is the time for Trump to turn his White House wrecking crew on the other eyesores of the federal district’s Brutalist era, from the FBI headquarters to the Department of Education to the Postal Service headquarters.
His executive order has the potential to restore Washington as a classical city.
It also nudges cities such as New York closer than ever to restoring their own classical inheritance.
Might we even see the reconstruction of McKim, Mead & White’s old Pennsylvania Station? The original track layout and even some stairwells conveniently remain in place following its 1963 demolition.
Through it all, critics will continue to smear America’s classical heritage. The Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History and Culture has even labeled the “primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.”
Trump’s righteous response has been to redouble his own classical initiatives. In part this has meant commissioning new classical projects.
Recently Trump could be seen with the model of an Independence Arch to be constructed across from the Lincoln Memorial.
Such an arch would extend to Washington the appearance of those beloved structures built in New York around the turn of the last century.
Another example of Trump’s classical retort has been his forthcoming National Garden of American Heroes.
By commissioning new statues of Americans “chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” as its executive order spells out, the National Garden will “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.”
In line with the National Garden have been Trump’s efforts to restore those statues attacked in the riots of the last decade. Grants have already gone out to piece together the shattered fragments of monuments to Christopher Columbus.
Here we can hope Trump will push his restoratory agenda to maximal effect. No statue should be canceled by the rioters’ veto or those institutions and municipalities that fell under their sway.
A primary goal should be the restoration of Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue to the New York state memorial dedicated to the 26th president, in front of the American Museum of Natural History. The sculpture was integral to the Roosevelt Rotunda as it looked out from the triumphal arch framing the museum’s entryway.
The heroic statue was also racially inclusive, pairing Roosevelt with figures representing Africa and the Americas. The assembly was in fact designed to represent “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” as its sculptor James Earle Fraser explained.
In 2018, a memorial commission determined the monument should stay. Nevertheless, in 2020 the city under Mayor Bill de Blasio along with museum director Ellen Futter decreed the statue to be a “hurtful” symbol of “systemic racism,” and so it went.
A counteroffensive fashioned in the manner of Trump’s review of American universities could finally bring such municipalities and institutions to heel until the return of this cultural patrimony, along with the funds to pay for the statues’ upkeep and protection.
Over a hundred years ago, a movement called City Beautiful undertook a wave of architectural and urban reform.
American municipalities reached new heights of enlightened public planning through the studied application of Beaux-Arts and classical design.
On the eve of the US semiquincentennial, an America Beautiful movement appears ready to reinvigorate this classical inheritance with monumental fanfare and a president built for such restoration.
James Panero is executive editor of the New Criterion, from whose December issue this article is adapted.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
