It’s official: Washington, D.C. has entered its Versailles phase. CBS News reports that President Donald Trump has summarily dismissed all six sitting members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—the body that, for more than a century, has ensured that the nation’s capital doesn’t look like a suburban megachurch with delusions of grandeur. The firings clear the way for a building blitz so aggressive it makes Mussolini’s infrastructure program look like a community garden project.
At the top of the agenda: demolishing the White House East Wing to erect a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, and constructing a triumphal arch across the Potomac River. The White House calls it “a return to beauty.” Everyone else calls it “Mar-a-Lago meets Caesar salad.”
The justification comes courtesy of Trump’s August executive order, Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again—a title that suggests he mistook a Frank Gehry portfolio for a crime scene. Citing “alignment with traditional aesthetics,” the order effectively lets Trump play SimCity with federal landmarks.
And now, with the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) sacked and the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) stacked, he controls the aesthetic destiny of the nation’s capital.
A Commission Without Commissions
The CFA has existed since 1910 to ensure that federal design projects—monuments, memorials, public buildings—serve the public good, not just the ego of whoever occupies the Oval Office. It’s advisory, not veto-wielding, but its recommendations have carried moral and professional weight for over a century.
Until now.
Trump fired every member of the Commission without warning. Gone are the architects, artists, and historians who helped maintain design integrity from the Lincoln Memorial to the Kennedy Center. In their place, a to-be-announced panel of “patriotic traditionalists” (translation: whoever claps the loudest at donor dinners and prefers gold trim to good proportions).
At the same time, Trump has quietly installed loyalists at the National Capital Planning Commission, the actual gatekeeper for federal construction approvals. Between the two, he now controls both the critique and the rubber stamp.
It’s not just centralizing power. It’s bulldozing it.
The Plan: A City of Marble and Megalomania
The capital-wide “beautification” plan, as officials call it, reads like a fever dream from a man who once thought the Lincoln Memorial needed more seating.
- Demolish the East Wing to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
- Construct a triumphal arch across the Potomac, possibly visible from Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
- Rework the Ellipse into a “Garden of American Greatness,” complete with statues of “forgotten heroes” and, reportedly, a reflecting pool in the shape of the letter T.
The East Wing demolition decision dropped last week, fast-tracked under the August order and justified by “efficiency.” It’s unclear how tearing down a functioning wing and replacing it with a $300 million donor palace improves efficiency, unless the goal is to make ballroom dinners more convenient than Cabinet meetings.
At a closed-door donor event last week, Trump reportedly bragged that the ballroom will be “the largest, most luxurious in the world—no zoning, no limits, total beauty.” The phrase “zero zoning conditions” echoed like a prophecy of disaster.
The Legal Landscape: How to Evade Oversight 101
On paper, federal design projects follow a layered review process. The CFA provides design feedback. The NCPC grants approval for federal sites and master plans. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation oversees compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. And if federal funds are involved, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires an environmental review.
That’s the process when rules apply.
Trump’s playbook rewrites that. By firing the CFA, stacking the NCPC, and invoking executive authority, he’s created a closed loop of self-approval. The administration insists that prior Biden-era removals of appointees make this legal. Critics counter that no president has ever wiped an entire commission clean to greenlight their own pet projects.
In other words, the checks and balances have been replaced with “whatever the boss wants.”
The Timeline of Taste’s Demise
The collapse of oversight didn’t happen overnight. It followed a sequence of strategic coups.
- July: Trump quietly replaced multiple members of the NCPC with campaign donors and former real estate associates.
- August: He signed the Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again order, reviving his old grievance against modernism.
- Last week: The White House issued a demolition decision for the East Wing, citing “executive efficiency.”
- Today: All six members of the CFA were dismissed in a single stroke.
- Next week: A new “design review team” will be announced—likely led by whoever designed the Trump International Hotel’s chandeliers.
At this rate, the Washington Monument will have LED uplighting by November.
The Donor Dinner Heard Round the Beltway
The $300 million ballroom wasn’t conceived in an architectural studio. It was born at a donor dinner. According to attendees, Trump floated the idea while gesturing toward renderings of a grand hall “for America’s finest gatherings.”
When pressed about where the money would come from, he smiled and said, “We have donors. Tremendous donors. The best.”
That’s the problem. The ballroom isn’t a civic project—it’s a political favor dressed in limestone. The public pays for the maintenance, but private donors get the table seats and naming rights. The “zero zoning conditions” boast wasn’t just rhetorical. The White House Counsel’s office later confirmed that the project is being processed under emergency executive authority to “avoid bureaucratic delay.”
Which is another way of saying, “Don’t ask.”
Manufactured Outrage, Manufactured Grandeur
The administration dismissed criticism as “manufactured outrage.” A White House spokesperson said, “The president believes in classical beauty. This is about restoring dignity to federal spaces.”
But dignity doesn’t require a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. It requires accountability.
Architects and historians are livid. The American Institute of Architects called the move “a dangerous conflation of aesthetics and autocracy.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation warned that fast-tracking demolition in the most historic building in America “undermines every precedent of stewardship since the founding.”
Representative Jared Huffman of California put it bluntly: “He’s literally demolishing part of the White House to build a donor dance floor.”
The Symbolism: Power by Design
Architecture has always been political. The Founders used neoclassicism to symbolize democracy and restraint. Trump uses it to symbolize dominance. His love for columns and arches isn’t about history—it’s about hierarchy.
Every authoritarian regime eventually discovers the power of monuments. Grandeur becomes shorthand for legitimacy. A bigger building equals a bigger ego.
The planned triumphal arch across the Potomac will stand as a physical metaphor for Trumpism: enormous, unnecessary, and blocking the view.
The Process in Limbo
For now, the CFA remains vacant. The NCPC is scheduled to hold hearings on the ballroom and arch proposals later this month. Preservation groups are preparing emergency filings under Section 106 and NEPA, hoping to force reviews before demolition begins.
But the administration’s strategy is speed. Every day of litigation is another day closer to breaking ground. Once the wrecking ball hits the East Wing, no injunction can bring it back.
If history is any guide, the process will be shrouded in “preliminary stages” until the bulldozers arrive. By then, transparency will be as extinct as oversight.
The Money Trail: A Billion-Dollar Aesthetic
Follow the cash and you find the truth. The ballroom’s $300 million budget comes not from appropriated funds but from a “public-private partnership.” Translation: donors pay up front, reap influence later.
Federal procurement laws require competitive bidding, environmental reviews, and public accounting. But the White House insists this falls under “presidential improvement,” a category vague enough to fit a gold-plated bowling alley.
The same donors who attended the unveiling dinner are rumored to be vying for naming rights: The Koch Ballroom, the Adelson Arch, perhaps a Mar-a-Lago Annex for future inaugurations.
Meanwhile, the USDA food stamp reserves sit locked, unfunded, and frozen. America, it seems, can’t afford groceries, but it can afford a ballroom.
The Preservation Pushback
Letters from Representatives Huffman, Robert Garcia, and Yassamin Ansari demand full transparency and halt orders pending review. They call it “an abuse of executive privilege for personal glorification.”
Preservation groups have filed emergency petitions with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Legal scholars are floating the idea of a NEPA trigger, arguing that the demolition and reconstruction constitute a major federal action with significant environmental impact.
Architectural historians are writing open letters faster than the administration can ignore them.
Even the conservative National Civic Art Society—normally sympathetic to classical revival—called the plan “a perversion of tradition for vanity.”
When you’ve lost the marble enthusiasts, your project might not be about beauty.
The White House Response: “We’re Building Greatness”
In an official statement, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The president believes that great nations deserve great architecture. These changes will celebrate American greatness and bring pride back to Washington.”
Pride, apparently, costs three hundred million dollars and comes with valet parking.
Critics note that this “greatness” conveniently aligns with Trump’s taste for excess: gold trim, mirrored surfaces, and acoustics designed for standing ovations. If federal architecture once symbolized civic virtue, it now resembles a casino convention center that misplaced its humility.
The Oversight Void
Congress could theoretically intervene by tying funding to transparency conditions. But during a shutdown, funding leverage is thin, and most agencies are running on fumes.
Inspectors general can audit contracts after the fact, but not before bulldozers roll. The Government Accountability Office can open reviews, but only if asked. So far, no Republican committee chairs have requested one.
It’s a perfect vacuum: no commissioners, no oversight, no sunlight.
The Optics Abroad
Foreign correspondents are treating the story like an allegory. In Le Monde, one headline reads: “L’Empereur de Washington.” The BBC’s architecture critic called it “the most expensive midlife crisis in American history.”
Even allies are baffled. One EU diplomat quipped, “You can’t spell ‘authoritarian aesthetic’ without ‘arch.’”
The Broader Pattern
This is not about marble. It’s about muscle. The same administration that froze food assistance for forty million Americans now wants to build a ballroom for donors. The same president who complains about “elites” is building himself a palace.
Architecture is policy by other means. In this case, it’s propaganda with plumbing.
Trump’s government treats public design as private theater—a stage set for power, not democracy. By dismantling the referees, he’s rewriting the script.
Closing Section: The Architecture of Power
The last time Washington faced a crisis over architecture, it was about modernism versus classicism. This time, it’s about democracy versus narcissism.
Firing the Commission of Fine Arts isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about eliminating anyone who might say “no.” And when the referees are gone, government becomes self-dealing spectacle.
The $300 million ballroom is more than a building—it’s a mirror, reflecting a presidency that mistakes vanity for vision and marble for meaning.
The triumphal arch will stand not as a monument to American greatness, but as a warning: that even in the capital of a democracy, power can still build temples to itself while pretending it’s doing the people a favor.
And when future historians walk through that 90,000-square-foot echo chamber, they won’t marvel at its beauty. They’ll whisper the real architectural truth of this era—that the foundation wasn’t stone, it was ego.