founding of the United States of America Archives

Why Does Donald Trump Like Neoclassical Architecture So Much?

On 21 December 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which officially establishes the Neoclassical architectural style as the “preferred” style for all United States federal buildings. The same executive order disparages Modernist architecture as “ugly and inconsistent.”

In practical terms, Trump’s executive order doesn’t mean much, since it only establishes the Neoclassical style as a “preferred” style and does not outright ban other styles. Moreover, the executive order is almost certainly going to go in the paper shredder as soon as President-Elect Joe Biden assumes office on 20 January 2021.

Nonetheless, the fact that Trump apparently felt strongly enough about Neoclassical architecture to issue an executive order on the subject right before he leaves office raises all sorts of interesting questions about what Neoclassical architecture represents in a modern political context and why a man like Donald Trump would devote time to enshrine it as a “preferred style” for anything.

When Does United States History Really Begin?

There’s a lot of controversy going on right now about when we should say that United States history begins. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched an initiative called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that the year 1619 should be seen as the true year when the United States was founded because that is the year when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the English colonies in North America.

In response to this, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” throughout the United States and to defend traditional narratives about American history against the claims made by the 1619 Project. I’ve already written an entire article about what a ridiculous idea I think this is, so I’m not going to talk any more about it.

What is interesting, though, is the way that both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission fixate on particular dates for the supposed founding of the United States. I contend that both of these proposed dates are fundamentally flawed. In fact, I believe that it is a mistake to try to pin down any particular date for the founding of the United States. This country has come into existence through a long, gradual process and focusing on exact dates and saying those dates matter more than all the others limits the ways we can think about American history and naturally tends to marginalize certain groups of people from the American story.