The story of the second Trump administration is the story of a White House systematically wrecking government institutions and then scrambling to deal with the consequences when those institutions inevitably hemorrhage prestige. Mizelle’s tweet is an example. Respectable people don’t want to work for a DOJ that functions as consigliere in a mafia family so cronies like him now have to slum it on Twitter to drum up public interest, like a “tube man” blowing around outside a car dealership to attract attention.
Lowering recruiting standards is one way for an institution to cope with shedding prestige from being mismanaged, and of course, the Justice Department isn’t the only example of that in Trump’s government. But there are other ways. Sometimes the president does something close to the opposite, papering over the grubbiness of the government he’s created by manufacturing phony grandeur.
Ice cream and dog feces.
Take, for example, the Kennedy Center—or, if we must, the “Trump Kennedy Center.”
The artist boycott of the institution that picked up after its name was changed in December has continued, with composer Stephen Schwartz pulling out of an event he was supposed to host for the Washington National Opera in May and composer Philip Glass canceling the premiere of his new symphony (Lincoln) in June. Increasingly it looked like Trump would spend the rest of his term trying and failing to recruit elite musical talent to legitimize his vanity project by performing there, guaranteeing a yearslong stream of bad press. The writing was on the wall.
So he’s knocking the wall down. Last night the president announced that the center will close its doors on July 4 for “for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” that’s expected to last approximately two years. The renovation, he said, “will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.” He ruined the institution’s prestige by taking it over—but don’t you worry, the grandeur to come will knock your socks off.
His decision was supposedly made after a year of consulting with experts about whether reconstruction would or wouldn’t require a shutdown, but three staffers at the center told the Washington Post that “they had not been previously notified of any plans to close the center, though some had long speculated a shutdown was possible.” There’s no word on how any currently existing contracts with artists to perform there after July 4 will be dealt with. (The organization’s website has events scheduled for August and September as of this writing.) And of course there’s no indication that Congress will have a say in the center’s renovations despite the fact that it was created by federal statute and continues to be federally funded.
The episode reeks of a spoiled child taking his ball and going home because no one wanted to play by his rules, but it reveals something important about the president’s relationship with prestige. “It’s the equivalent of his thinking he can extort someone else’s Nobel Prize on an institutional level,” Vox editor Benjy Sarlin said of Trump attaching his name to the center. “He wants the prestige from elite institutions, but the prestige is derived from the institutional history and disappears when he wrecks it.”
Precisely right. The same thing is happening at the DOJ. Despite its gold-plated brand, Trump’s law enforcement agency now struggles to attract talent because under his leadership the qualities that made it prestigious no longer remain. He dirtied it up by appointing cronies to key positions, tasked them with carrying out his grudges, then watched as his deputies steered the department into predictable embarrassments. As with the Kennedy Center, I think he assumed that the traditional public esteem in which the Justice Department has been held would legitimize his dubious plans for the organization. Instead the opposite happened: He delegitimized the institution by politicizing it so brazenly and ruined its prestige.
As the saying goes, if you mix a pint of ice cream with a pint of dog feces, the result will taste distinctly more like one ingredient than the other. The president keeps whipping up concoctions along those lines at institutions like the DOJ and Kennedy Center, desperately hoping everyone will tell him they taste like Ben & Jerry’s, then seems caught off guard when people start vomiting it up.
But closing the center is only half the story. It’s also revealing that Trump’s response to once again being denied the prestige he craves is to wreck and rebuild the structure, one of several ambitious construction projects he’s undertaken. We all know about the empty space where the White House’s East Wing once stood, still awaiting a presidential ballroom that seems to get bigger by the day. The Post reported last week, though, that the president is now also hoping to erect a 250-foot-high “triumphal arch” across the river in Arlington, Virginia, in time for America’s 250th birthday this July.
He’s even posted mock-ups of three designs to his social media account. Given his usual taste in decor, I have a guess as to which of the three is his favorite.
“I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” he told reporters of the arch, referring to similar structures in countries like France and India. After all, “we’re the biggest, most powerful nation.” (The biggest?) That argument has begun to turn up on his Truth Social account too. Size matters, it seems.
But why? Why all the focus lately on architectural grandeur?
The gilded age.
One not very interesting answer is that it’s his usual grandiose narcissism at work, nothing more or less. This is a guy whose gut reaction on 9/11 after watching the World Trade Center fall was that he now owned the largest tower in lower Manhattan. Building the biggest arch, the best ballroom, the most amazing performance-arts center is just who he is.
Besides, each project is destined to be a monument to him personally to some greater or lesser (i.e., greater) degree. Each will bear the Trump name in conspicuous ways, I’m sure, with the new “Trump Kennedy Center” especially likely to have his fingerprints all over it in order to make it harder for his political enemies to remove all trace of him after he’s gone. Chiseling his name off the facade is too easy. He’s going to splatter it on the walls, the rugs, and the ceiling.
Another answer is that his monument projects reflect his imperial ambitions.
That’s also grandiose narcissism, of course, but of a particular kind. All emperors aim to leave their mark on history and one facet of that is leaving their mark architecturally by building gleaming marble memorials of their reign. No president in American history has aspired to be Caesar as plainly as Trump has, from his habit of gilding everything in sight to his thirst for conquest in Greenland and Venezuela to his grotesque autocratic domination of Republicans in Congress. To be a proper Caesar, you need proper grandeur. That includes public works.
The Kennedy Center is his amphitheater, the White House ballroom is his palace, and the triumphal arch is, well, his triumphal arch. It’s a “RETVRN” fantasy come to life. God only knows what self-aggrandizing stunts he has planned for the 250th anniversary of American independence this summer, but I admit to being morbidly curious. Nothing would capture the perversion of our founding ideals as succinctly as turning the semiquincentennial into a glorification ritual for a monarch whom 55 percent of the country dislikes.
There’s a third possibility. Perhaps the president’s recent binge of architectural grandeur betrays his awareness that he, and America, are in decline.
Probably not—or not consciously. Trump is the last person you’d expect to engage in self-reflection, and if he did, his ego would find any evidence of diminishment intolerable. But he’s conscious of his mortality, at least, political and otherwise. He’s doubtless aware of how much his opponents detest him, he must realize that most of his policies can and will be reversed by executive order in time, and he might grasp that America under his leadership is less esteemed abroad than it used to be. (Whether he cares is another matter.)
If I were Nero in twilight, anxious that posterity would remember my reign chiefly for its grotesquely rapacious corruption and my calamitous stewardship of Rome, I might also resolve to carve a grand legacy for myself into the landscape. Historians might impugn me, my successors might disavow me—but my arch would stand forever.
The absurd grandeur of the projects he’s planning is a confession of national decadence even if Trump isn’t aware of it, I think. The “biggest, most powerful nation” somehow managed to become the biggest, most powerful nation without turning its executive mansion into a palace or building a tacky faux-Roman tribute to its military victories. Small-R republican America didn’t need the paraphernalia of imperial power to feel assured of its greatness. The fact that we do need that paraphernalia now, per our elected leader, suggests we’ve at last reached a point of decline where reassurance is necessary.
Chad Mizelle’s tweet, the Kennedy Center shutdown, and the Arlington arch are each reactions to losing respect—of the legal profession, of patrons of the arts, and of a population that doesn’t believe America is being made great again. We chose a grubby kakistocracy to govern us, it’s predictably turning the United States into a third-world country, and the best it can do to replace the grandeur that it’s squandered is to start slapping gilt on stuff. To atone for wrecking the prestige that American institutions spent centuries amassing, postliberal populists are humbly offering to build crapola built with marble. After all, marble is prestigious.
It’s the material of which ruins are made, perfect for an administration trapped in a nostalgic fantasy.
