What should we do with Trump’s monstrous architectural legacy? | Jan-Werner Müller

Questions over Trump’s ballroom and other structures might not feel urgent.

But when his reign ends, Trumpism must be repudiated On Monday, a majority on the supreme court found a technical way to overrule a lower court’s imperative to stop work, while not taking a stance on whether the whole enterprise might be illegal to begin with.

Preservationists, the majority held, appear to lack legal grounds for filing a suit blocking Trump’s ballroom; that means construction will proceed, even if none other than John Roberts, in a dissent, held that “those responsible” were breaking the rules in deciding “ what to build up at the People’s House ”.

The solicitor general John Sauer is on record claiming that 65% of the project is completed (of course, he might have exaggerated – such things are known to have happened in Trump administrations).

Either way, it is thus likely that there will be a massive structure next to the original White House; and, given that the ruling will embolden the president dramatically to change Washington DC’s landscape by spending money never approved by Congress, we might be cursed with a triumphal arch as well.

All of which raises the question: what to do with a monstrous architectural legacy in post-Trump America? Some might dismiss the question as a bit of a luxury problem.

After all, a war that also demonstrates the ongoing disempowerment of Congress keeps dragging on; ICE continues its cruel day-to-day work; Trump is trying every tactic to make the midterms go his way.

But the built environment, and especially the civic landscape of a capital, is never just an afterthought.

Buildings and monuments make values visible, as the philosopher Susan Neiman once put it .

And the decision to leave Trump’s structures in place as if his reign had just been another normal era in US history is not neutral – just like leaving Confederate monuments in place is not neutral.

Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University Continue reading...