News of Trump’s Classical edict seemed particularly grotesque given the Trump Organization’s construction of some of the cheesiest Modernist public buildings in recent history, epitomized by Der Scutt’s gold-mirror-glass glitzkrieg, Trump Tower of 1979–1983 in New York City. So, here we are again, being distracted and diverted by yet another of the peripheral issues through which Trump exercises media manipulation. With the same flagrant hypocrisy he displays politically, Trump has now marketed himself as a guardian of taste. But the effective ban on modern architecture commissioned by the US government that the president proposes is horrifyingly reminiscent of Hitler’s insistence that public buildings in the Third Reich hew to the Classical tradition.
