Trump’s Maximalist Makeover Brings ‘Founding Fathers Bling’ to the Oval Office

When the 47th president does something right, he repents by doing something that contradicts it. Consider his excellent executive order about the importance of aesthetic good taste in governance, and his subsequent redecoration of the Oval Office.Issued during the blizzard of orders in his first full day in office, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” was thoughtful and sensible. Making amends for this, the president has redecorated the Oval Office. The style, which is not for the squeamish, is best described (actually, it is best not described, but here goes) as: “The Atlantic-City-Aspiring-to-be-Las-Vegas School of Interior Design.” Or (intellectual whiplash warning) Founding Fathers Bling. In short: Maximalism.The president evidently likes working inside a Fabergé egg. For readers of the Washington Post, Carolina A. Miranda, a talented cultural journalist, has described the new Oval Office, stuffed with stuff:“The mantel is adorned by seven gold examples of authentic bric-a-brac. Gold floral moldings are stuck here and there. Gold angels. Gold eagles on side tables. Gold coasters. Gold medallions on the fireplace. Gilded mirrors on the doors and gilded frames for about 20 paintings, more than triple the number Biden had, so there. Gold cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago, which is probably still not destitute of them. Gold coasters. A large gold block paperweight inscribed with TRUMP, in case he momentarily forgets to think about himself.”Ms. Miranda finds this sinister. And she bills the decor as “un-American.” If only.We have a national knack for wretched excess, of which Super Bowl halftime shows are, amazingly, not the most vivid eruptions. Remember Detroit’s 1950s land yachts: The 1956 Chrysler Imperial and the 1958 Lincoln Premiere were 19 feet long. What is more vulgar than 21st-century State of the Union addresses?Benjamin Franklin pointedly wore clothes of homespun cloth to the Court of St. James’s, and Thomas Jefferson sometimes wore slippers when receiving presidential visitors. Nowadays, however, Americans enjoy leavening republican simplicity with touchingly absurd attempts at grandeur: There are, surely, communities where Kiwanis Club lunches are held in Holiday Inns’ Versailles Rooms, cheek-by-jowl with hardware stores and grain silos.What has become of the aesthete who issued the Day 1 presidential order on “beautiful federal civic architecture”? The president said: “Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Quite right.Recently an architecture student at Catholic University, Paul Zepeda, writing for Civitas Outlook of the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute, noted that the current president was reversing his predecessor’s reversal of a 2020 executive order. Cue the “here-comes-Hitler” warnings. (He did have an unhealthy interest in overbearing architecture that diminished the individual relative to the state.) And critics of the president’s January order issued somber warnings about attacks on “design freedom.”“Design freedom,” which has often meant indifference to design, has blighted Washington with durable examples of brutalist architecture, such as the FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Might such architecture foment in citizens a sense of alienation from their government?In October 1943, after German bombs destroyed the House of Commons, Churchill insisted on rebuilding it with its traditional rectangular, and adversarial, arrangement rather than the semicircular design favored by many legislatures (including the American Congress). Churchill thought it supported the temperateness of a two-party system. He said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”Mr. Zepeda argues that, traditionally, here and elsewhere, “buildings with the greatest significance to the community” should be designed with cognizance of the moral dimension of the physical. Each building’s human scale, decoration, ornaments and measured proportions should reinforce in those who see and enter them a sense of the nobility and dignity of what transpires in them.A federal building should be, Mr. Zepeda says, “a celebration of self-government, a fluorescence of the republican system.” The classical temple-like building in which the Supreme Court sits is probably related to the court’s remarkably durable prestige, which is a potent fact in contemporary governance.In the unlikely event that the current president wearies of the golden monochrome of his Oval Office surroundings, he can swivel his chair 180 degrees and contemplate the National Mall, one of the world’s great urban spaces. Its clean, spare, Euclidean geometry is an analogue of our society’s premise and promise: open vistas and open minds.The Mall’s symmetry, balance, and proportion encourage a similar mentality, infusing political institutions and civil society with restraint. At least they used to.The Washington Post

Trump’s Maximalist Makeover Brings ‘Founding Fathers Bling’ to the Oval Office

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