Half a century ago, Uranus-Izvor, a community atop Bucharest’s Dealul Hill, was a neighborhood of church spires and onion domes, of Rococo Habsburg elegance and Romanian charm. When a 1977 earthquake damaged buildings in the district, Romania’s oppressive Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu seized the excuse to evict 40,000 residents and demolish the remainder of the neighborhood so that he could construct a massive vanity project, the House of the Republic, an eyesore of a palace most notable for being the third-largest administrative building on earth. Gone were the domes of the Orthodox Văcărești Monastery, the stately, neoclassical Brâncovenesc Hospital, and the entirety of the Jewish Quarter. Now, leering over Bucharest’s citizens was Ceaușescu’s monstrous edifice of broad, blocky white marble and steel. An impersonal, inhuman monolith inspired by North Korean architecture, the House of the Republic was a monument to Ceaușescu’s overweening narcissism and hubris, and, paradoxically, a testament to faceless anonymity in its soullessness. This week, history repeats itself, as President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the East Wing of the White House for the supposed construction of a 90,000-square-foot gilded ballroom.
The House of the Republic, also known as the Palace of Parliament, in Bucharest (photo by Stjepko Krehula via Wikimedia Commons, CC by 4.0)
Displays of wanton tackiness have been Trump’s modus operandi since he was a predatory real estate developer in New York. Despite his (and his supporters’) delusions that the name “Trump” is synonymous with luxury and class, his properties have always been marked by gaudy excess, a pantomime of elegance crusted in faux-gold and surfaces painted to look like marble. Much of his sense of style, reminiscent as it is of the taste of Gulf State petro-barons and Russian oligarchs, has clear historical precedents. Like any narcissistic autocrat, he spends his days obsessing over plans for his $300 million ballroom addition to the White House or a massive grand arch in Arlington — “undoubtedly an attempt to proclaim the president’s own perceived victories,” scholar Sarah Bond writes in these pages. Trump’s style is a poor man’s fantasy of wealth; the White House becoming a discount Versailles featuring gold-painted Home Depot fixtures is an apt metaphor for his entire administration. Art critic Clement Greenberg argued that fascist aesthetics was defined by “Kitsch… [as] vicarious experience and faked sensations.” Such a sensibility is obvious in everything from Trump’s planned monuments to his rallies, a certain “tackiness of evil” (with apologies to Hannah Arendt) that’s as gilded as it is rotten.
Economist Paul Krugman argued in his Substack this week that “Tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand,” and it’s a salient observation from Dealul Hill to Capitol Hill. Completed in 1997, eight years after Ceaușescu had been tried and summarily executed by the Romanian people on Christmas Day, the House of the Republic persists today as a 276-foot-tall, 890-foot-wide edifice (84 x 270m), with bunkers that go 302 feet (92 m) deep, and a dizzying 1,100 rooms. Less than half of those are used today by the now-democratic Romanian Parliament that meets in the building. More than just being oppressive, the House of the Republic is tasteless. It has 2,800 chandeliers — nearly three per room — made of 3,500 tons of crystal. It consists of four million tons of marble, steel, and bronze — making it the heaviest building on earth, and one that is literally sinking into Bucharest’s soil at a rate of a quarter-foot per year, almost too apt of a metaphor. But the point isn’t that Ceaușescu was allergic to taste or decorum. Rather, the hideousness of the building was itself crucial — a means of erasing the history of Uranus-Izvor, of communicating in marble and steel to the Romanian people, I can do with the past whatever I want. Not only that, but that the past can itself be replaced with something purposefully disproportionate, ostentatious, bloated, and hideous. The cruelty is the point, but so is the ugliness.
Interior of the House of the Republic, also known as the Palace of Parliament, in Bucharest in 2018 (photo by Rakoon via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0)
“[Trump] walked into a cathedral with a bullhorn, spray paint, and faux gold leaf,” Former Republican strategist and Never Trumper Rick Wilson wrote in his Substack this week. “He saw a place designed for civic honor, official tenderness, and historical respect and wondered why it didn’t look more like a casino atrium, a glittery Liberace dreamscape.” This is the two-part process of authoritarian aesthetics: destruction and then replacement, and what comes after must always be uglier than what came before. Old hat for Trump; when he demolished the Bonwit Teller department store at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street to construct the stark monolith that bears his name in 1980, he promised the 15-foot-tall Art Deco limestone friezes that decorated the former building’s crown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, only to jackhammer them into oblivion, claiming to the press that they were “without artistic merit.” Such affection for the wrecking ball seems to have been nurtured across generations in the Trump Organization — see, for instance, the president’s father (a former Klansman) charging admission to a “demolition party” at the site of Coney Island’s Victorian Steeplechase Park as a means of circumventing historic preservation laws in 1965. This same attitude of sacrilege is operative in Trump’s Washington, whether in the January 6th insurrection that saw his supporters smearing shit on the Capitol walls or the (slightly) more genteel destruction of the East Wing. In substituting taste with tackiness, Trump demonstrates his power.
Left: Bonwit Teller New York City flagship store (c. 1930s) (photo by Digital Collections, The New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0); right: Trump Tower in the same location in New York City (2014) (photo by Paulo JC Nogueira via Wikimedia Commons; edit Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
For example, sketches of Trump’s ballroom, suspiciously budgeted at the mind-numbing amount of more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars (this, amidst a government shutdown with SNAP benefits due to expire in November), depict a massive asymmetrical wing with a faux-classical edifice, a massive structure that dwarfs the historic mansion next to it. As Catherine Slessor put it in the Guardian, “Trump’s style edicts and building bombast exude a dictator-for-life megalomania vibe.” White House architect James McCrery, who studied under modernists Peter Eisenman and Jeff Kipnis at Ohio State before pivoting to traditionalist designs, has framed his vocation in theological language, describing the work of his mentors as “ungodly” and declaring that projects must be resonant with “God’s creation.” One wonders what the Lord would think of McCrery’s schematics, in which the future ballroom appears more like a lopsided, sickly-sweet, fondant-covered wedding cake than a building exemplifying those classical principles of harmony, balance, and order.
Considering his training, it’s hard to imagine that McCrery doesn’t see what the rest of us do when confronted with the vulgarity of his plans, though fascism is in part built on the elevation of incompetents. Andrea Palladio, the 16th-century Italian architect who originated much of what we think of as the traditionalist and classical design McCrery erroneously believes he practices, wrote that “Beauty will result from the form and correspondence of the whole … that the structure may appear an entire and complete body.” Where is there such harmony in the White House ballroom? Is it in the stairway to nowhere along the side of the building? The two windows facing each other at a 90-degree angle for some reason? “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin argued in his classic 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He’s correct inasmuch as Nazi propaganda integrated the ersatz-spiritual and the aesthetic, though it’s important to also remember just how much of that work was just plain hideous. In that vein, Trump’s White House isn’t a Palladian temple; it’s a Mafia Don’s McMansion.
President Donald Trump walks on the West Colonnade with Tricia Nixon Cox and her husband Edward Cox, after being presented with the Richard Nixon Architect of Peace Award, Tuesday (2025) (photo Daniel Torok/ Official White House)
Susan Sontag infamously coined “fascinating fascism” to describe the allure that such aesthetics can have for audiences in a 1975 essay for The New York Review of Books. Despite the moral abomination of particular fascist artists, it’s true that there were a handful of aesthetic visionaries whose work is admired, from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to the sculptures of F.T. Marinetti, the architecture of Giuseppe Terragni to the fashion of Hugo Boss. “Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics — that of physical perfection,” argued Sontag. But while there is accuracy to that claim in the most rarefied of examples, such a statement overlooks the bulk of authoritarian art, which is terrible. See, for instance, the irredeemable tackiness of the 1934 “Mussolini Façade” to the Palazzo Braschi in Rome, in which the dictator’s face is made to loom over the square, appearing nothing so much like the Wizard of Oz, or the domed pomposity of Albert Speer’s planned future iteration of Berlin (which of course featured triumphant arches). For further examples, examine the 1999 painting depicting Saddam Hussein as a conquering Babylonian king or Turkmenistan’s late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who constructed a 40-foot-tall golden statue of himself that could turn to meet the dawn. Tackiness is the cultural logic of authoritarianism.
Rendering of the planned ballroom in the East Wing of the White House (image via the White House)
That’s because, contrary to the stated aims of the designers and artists who act as handmaidens to such regimes, the point of this art is hardly to elevate, but rather to dominate. In fact, the more absurd — the uglier — such displays are, the more they reaffirm the omnipresence and power of the state. The phrase “the tackiness of evil” may seem glib, a joke about Arendt’s moral evaluation of the titular Nazi functionary in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: On the Banality of Evil, but it should be taken seriously. After all, judging someone as prosaic, as banal, is its own form of artistic evaluation, and while aesthetics shouldn’t be subsumed into ethics, the former can make an argument about the latter. Aesthetics are a form of ethics, demonstrating what we value.
Ironically, for all of McCrery’s bloviating about godless and degenerate Modernist architecture, it’s his current project that demonstrates a profound cynicism, a pernicious nihilism. The court-architect is simply a trader in cheap kitsch, a master of the hideous. In bulldozing the East Wing, Trump is erasing history in a far more literal way than all the bellyaching his supporters made about the removal of Confederate memorials. “Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism,” wrote Theodor Adorno in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality — something we ought to remember as we survey the rubble of the White House. What will rise on that spot will be travesties not just aesthetically deficient, but spiritually anemic as well. Such monuments have a way of enduring — even as Romania today is a modern democracy, Ceaușescu’s folly still looms over Bucharest as a reminder of authoritarianism. The dictator himself, however, was buried in an unmarked grave.
