That may be the only time, as far as I can remember, that Trump ever built anything in the interest of unity and harmony. In general, his profligate use of shiny materials has symbolized only one thing: his bottomless appetite for opulence.

Trump’s Washington, or at least his White House, has thus far followed suit. The gold trim with which he has festooned the Oval Office makes it look like a scene from a czarist theme park. And his newly remodeled Lincoln Bathroom suggests a very plush mausoleum. While he might invoke the (small-r) republican architecture of the founding fathers in executive orders denouncing Modernist and Brutalist architecture, that does not mean he understands it. In truth, there is only one tradition of which Trump is an adherent: the ravenous, self-aggrandizing culture that’s long characterized much of New York City real estate development.

Prior to his hurried demolition of the East Wing, Trump’s most infamous destruction job involved a handsome 50-year-old Art Deco building that had been designed by Warren and Wetmore, architects best known for their design of Grand Central Terminal. It housed the beloved but financially troubled department store Bonwit Teller. Long a fashion leader, introducing designers such as Christian Dior and Calvin Klein to New York’s carriage trade, the store was also known for its wacky, artist-designed window displays, including a couple by Salvador Dalí (when he was already famous) and many by still-unknown artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. However, by the late 1970s, Bonwit Teller had lost its luster, and its parent company, Genesco, was having cash-flow problems.

Trump purchased the building in 1979 for $15 million with the intention of tearing it down; it occupied the spot where he planned to build—you guessed it—his first eponymous tower. His architect at the time, Der Scutt, reportedly tried to persuade Trump that the site on Fifth Avenue called for something more sober and, well, traditional. However, as Michael Lisicky wrote in a 2020 account in Forbes, “Trump was adamant that he wanted his Trump Tower to be a bronze-colored glass skyscraper. Scutt was unable to sway Trump. In 1980, the architect told New York Magazine, ‘If Donald hasn’t built it, it’s not any good. And it has to flash to be good.’”

To add insult to injury, Trump had promised to give the Metropolitan Museum of Art the building’s pair of 15-foot bas-relief sculptures of dancing women and a large nickel-plated grille that was mounted over the store’s entrance. Yet when Trump’s demolition crew arrived, they jackhammered it all into oblivion.

A Trump “spokesman” who identified himself as John Baron (a pseudonym often used by Trump) explained to a Daily News reporter at the time that the sculptures weren’t worth saving and the work needed to preserve them would have set back the construction schedule by two weeks. Which is to say that Trump’s respect for traditional architecture only extends to the point where it gets in his way.

The most alarming aspect of Trump’s ballroom, perhaps, is that it appears to be one project of many. Of course, during the first Trump term we were told he was masterminding an ambitious nationwide program of infrastructure construction. That never happened, and “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke.

But this time around, he’s not talking about airports or bridges or anything obviously useful. In fact, he’s lately taken to defunding significant infrastructure projects (like the new rail tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey) to punish his perceived enemies. Instead, what Trump is interested in is leaving his imprint on whatever he can, useful or not. For example, he’s revived plans floated during his first administration for a National Garden of American Heroes, a sculpture garden stocked, Madame Tussaud–style, with 250 Americans, chosen by a White House task force, including the founding fathers whose ideas he fails to grasp. He also wants to build a triumphal arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly to commemorate the 250th anniversary our country’s independence, but possibly more emblematic of the end of a pretty good two-and-a-half-century run.

The thing that is most unnerving about the arch is that the tradition it evokes is not that of classical republicanism and democracy but rather of a whole other era of bombastic overstatement. It is hard to look at renderings of that massive arch—particularly the way it’s positioned on an axis leading to the Lincoln Memorial—without seeing Albert Speer’s Germania, Hitler’s unbuilt plan to remake Berlin with a monumental Great Hall connected by a broad highway to a gargantuan arch.

People who live in a particular city often have a proprietary relationship with its buildings and learn the hard way, when a favorite is razed by its actual landlord, that their feeling of ownership is an illusion. Think of New York City’s famous Pennsylvania Station (with a waiting room modeled on Rome’s Baths of Caracalla), demolished in 1963, or Hudson’s in Detroit, the tallest department store in the world until it was imploded in 1998.

In Washington, DC, however, that sense of ownership is not illusory. Most of the landmark buildings do, in fact, belong to the public. The White House, for instance—or what remains of it—is owned by the American people. It is maintained on our behalf by the National Parks Service. It has never been the exclusive property of any of its occupants, including Trump. Normally, the construction of the ballroom (and the demolition of the East Wing) would be subject to a complex regulatory process that, in our nation’s capital, routinely involves a multitude of agencies and commissions. It is generally difficult to build anything in DC or to destroy publicly owned buildings.

Oddly, the White House sits in a loophole. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it is “expressly exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act” and therefore isn’t protected from demolition. Not coincidentally, the seven-member US Commission of Fine Arts, which will have to sign off on the design of the ballroom, was purged of its existing members by the White House in October. New members have not yet been announced (although McCrery, the ballroom architect, was appointed to the commission by Trump during his 
first term).

In a letter dated October 21, the day after the East Wing’s demolition had begun, Dr. Carol Quillen, the National Trust’s president and CEO, “respectfully urge[d] the Administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes.” But respectful urging is one of those nitpicky things, like the letter of the law, that doesn’t seem to mean a lot to our current president. Quillen goes on to point out: “These processes provide a crucial opportunity for transparency and broad engagement—values that have guided preservation of the White House under every administration going back to the public competition in 1792 that produced the building’s original design.”

In other words, the public process, like the columns and the domes, is a tradition. And, like buildings, a process can be bulldozed. As Robert Moses, one of the mid–20th century’s most energetic wielders of the bulldozer and no fan of public process, explained: “You have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Which is precisely what Trump just did.