The desecration of DC: from a giant arch to a nuke-proof bunker, Trump’s legacy-building blingfest is an architectural atrocity

When you have a developer as US president, you might expect some zhooshing up of the capital. A few buildings renovated, maybe some parks replanted. But when you have a megalomaniac builder in charge, things can get out of hand. A decade ago, when Donald Trump was first elected, I asked what it might mean for the US to be led by a real estate tycoon whose career had left a trail of broken promises, angry buyers and endless lawsuits, with rules flouted, heritage trampled and the world pockmarked by a fleet of aspirational towers clad with a flimsy veneer of luxury. The answer is worse than I could have imagined.

With the air of a nightmarish Hollywood sequel, Trump 2 has seen the president’s true architectural ambitions unleashed: The Blingpire Strikes Back. As America’s self-styled decorator-in-chief, Trump has not only overseen the gilded mutilation of the White House, but embarked on the Mar-a-Lagofication of Washington DC itself, applying his gold paintbrush to statuary, daubing ponds with flaking pool liner, and brewing plans for a colossal triumphal arch – all procured in a blizzard of no-bid contracts. And, in true dodgy salesman style, this programme of bauble-building is turning out to be a high-profile decoy for deeper damage being wrought elsewhere.

The bloated White House ballroom is the most emblematic project of Trump’s reign so far, a chandelier-bedecked warehouse conceived on a scale that would make Ceaușescu blush. Standing like an overly iced wedding cake atop a multilevel concrete bunker, it is a swaggering confection that masks deep-rooted paranoia: a decadently wrapped panic room, where a besieged dictator might hole themselves up.

“It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump promised last July, when he announced the plans. “Not touching it.” It would seat 650 guests and cost $200m, funded by private donations. Less than three months later, without waiting for congressional approval, he tore down the historic East Wing, and dumped the rubble on a nearby public golf course (which he also plans to redevelop). The ballroom ballooned, as if injected with rapid weight-gain formula, to seat 1,000 in a building three times the volume of the White House. The price has also tripled to $600m, at least half of which will now be picked up by the taxpayer.

Trump boasted that his ballroom will be “more beautiful” than Versailles, but it looks like something thrown together from the classical off-cuts bin, without any regard to how the pieces fit. “It has all the kneejerk gestures of classicism,” a former Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) official told me, “but they are not integrated in a way that makes any sense.”

A sweeping ceremonial staircase leads to nowhere. A grand pedimented entrance is shunted to one end of the east facade. The portico columns run four rows deep (“The supreme court is three deep,” Trump noted. “No other building has it, and I did it because it’s incredible.”) The ballroom’s proportions are so out of whack, it will make the White House look like a lopsided fiddler crab, the swollen appendage vastly dwarfing the original building.

The inflated scale was too much to bear for its architect, the bowtie-wearing James McCrery II, who protested at the increasingly Frankenstein nature of the classical details being applied. Enter Shalom Baranes, whose DC firm has handled multibillion dollar federal contracts, including the renovation of the Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks.

Baranes’s experience with fortified facilities has come in handy, given that the project has evolved into what Trump now calls “the Magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex”. The party hall, the president confirmed in March, “essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under” – namely a six-storey military-grade bunker, replete with a command and emergency operations centre, a full-scale military hospital, secure telecommunications hubs and situation rooms, all serviced by specialised air-handling and filtration networks to protect against biological, chemical and radiological threats. “It’s meant for if there’s a nuclear attack,” Trump has boasted. “The concrete is so hard, I’m not sure you could take it down.”

Behind the overblown cornice, the ballroom’s roof will be home to a military drone port and air-defence missile system. Images show it looking like an aircraft carrier parked next to the White House. In typically Trumpian newspeak, the project has gone from being a space to entertain dignitaries to a “desperately needed National Security structure” that must be completed at all costs.

After court rulings halted construction, the supreme court recently weighed in to allow it to resume – although, tellingly, the ruling made no comment on the project’s legality. But questions in the courts have revealed just how far Trump’s aides see his absolutist rule extending. “If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty,” one judge asked, “nothing can be done?” A lawyer for the administration responded: “I think that’s right, yes.”

Similarly bullish efforts are being made to force through the president’s second flagship vanity project, the elephantine triumphal arch. It was casually announced last October, with 3D-printed models displayed like tacky souvenirs in the Oval Office. It is planned to tower 250ft above Memorial Circle, a vast roundabout on Columbia Island in DC’s Potomac River – 1ft for every year of US independence. But there has been no ambiguity about what the looming edifice is really there to honour. When asked, Trump simply replied: “Me.”

It “will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch,” he boasted on social media, “anywhere in the World”. He has cited Roman precedents and “the one in Paris”, adding that his version “will surpass it in every way”. Oddly, given his fondness for the North Korean regime, he has neglected to mention Pyongyang’s Arch of Triumph, built in 1982 to mark Kim Il Sung’s 70th birthday. Clad with 25,500 blocks of sparkling white granite, one for each day of Kim’s life, its crowning stone slab rises 10m taller than Trump’s (although his is topped with a statue for an extra 25m of vanity height). Hitler’s Triumphbogen, also unmentioned, would have been twice the size.

To aid his Napoleonic cosplay, the president has hired Harrison Design, purveyors of gaudy McMansions from Atlanta to LA, with the arch project led by Nicolas Charbonneau, principal of the firm’s Sacred Architecture Studio. Charbonneau first sketched the idea to illustrate an April 2025 essay by conservative critic Catesby Leigh, titled Washington Needs an Arch. It proposed a modest structure of 60ft. Trump got hold of the idea and, with his irrepressible lust for supersizing, pumped it up fourfold.

As with the ballroom-bunker, the arch has become larger and more encrusted with gilded ornament – in a word, more Trumpian – as it has progressed. The final design, unveiled this April, features a 60ft golden-winged Lady Liberty sprouting from its top like an oversized cake-topper, flanked by two plump eagles. Even Trump’s allies have suggested the design could be toned down. At a CFA review, McCrery, the first ballroom architect, advised removing four golden lions from the base of the arch. “They’re noble, they’re courageous, and they’re strong,” he noted. But “they’re not of this continent”. The arch must celebrate American triumphs only – and that goes for the animals too.

The National Park Service has determined the project will “adversely affect” dozens of historic sites around DC, while a group of Vietnam veterans has filed a lawsuit, arguing the arch will be an unwelcome “expression of domination”, with its observation deck looming over Arlington National Cemetery. Neither of these are proving to be obstacles, with excavation set to begin soon.

Preliminary works do not augur well. A mockup of the arch was erected for the Great American State Fair in July, made of plywood wrapped with white vinyl. It buckled in the heat, its surfaces warping and peeling, while globules of expanding foam oozed from its wonky cornice. It was instantly dubbed the Temu arch – a fitting moniker, given that Trump’s Oval Office swags appear to have been sourced from the fellow Chinese online marketplace Alibaba.

The ballroom and the arch received tens of thousands of objections from the public, but both projects were fast-tracked through the system. As the former CFA official told me, it was “highly unusual” that the initial concept schemes were granted final approval without details being resolved. The ballroom took just 12 minutes of deliberation. And it has set the tone of things to come. There’s nothing a developer hates more than red tape, and Trump has vowed to streamline regulations across the board. Beyond speeding up his DC follies, the proposed changes will lubricate drilling, pipe-laying and datacentre building, in the name of “reclaiming America’s proud heritage as a nation of builders”.

Obscured by all the controversy around these trophy projects is the fact that the administration has moved to weaken protections on historic buildings and landscapes drastically, unleashing the steamroller of development across the country. The changes to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act would narrow the definition of historic places, exclude consideration of the “visual, atmospheric or audible” consequences of projects on historic sites, and reduce requirements for consulting Indigenous tribes and the public. As Brent Leggs, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, remarked, it would “eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States”.

The irony couldn’t be clearer. Trump bloviates about continuing America’s tradition of monument building, while weakening the very mechanisms that exist to protect the country’s heritage. Still, by slashing these protections, at least he is paving the way for his own additions to be toppled just as hastily as they were erected.

Given the construction quality so far, future topplers might not need much help. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool has now been drained for a second time, after the coating used in the first $15m renovation began peeling off within days of its completion. Despite a new filtration system intended to keep the water a pristine shade of “American Flag Blue”, massive algae blooms quickly turned it a swampy green. While Trump blamed vandals, justice department legal filings eventually conceded the failure was due to the “hasty and botched” renovation. “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump boasted, before awarding the no-bid contract to a company that had worked on his Virginia golf course.

Elsewhere around the capital, the “Safe and Beautiful” initiative has seen $76m spent on fountains, $5m on gilding a pair of equestrian statues of The Arts of War and The Arts of Peace, $500,000 on a single statue pedestal to display a statue of a prominent slave owner, which had been removed from Delaware amid Black Lives Matter protests, and countless other acts of cosmetic surgery in the name of cleaning up the “cesspool” of DC.

One of the crowning trinkets will be the National Garden of American Heroes, for which $40m has been ringfenced. According to Executive Order 13978, this park of 250 statues will “reflect the awesome splendour of our country’s timeless exceptionalism” in the face of the “reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values and entire way of life”. The list of figures to be commemorated includes slave owners and others whose statues were toppled in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Sculpture experts described the proposed timeline as “completely unworkable” and likely to produce “slapdash and uninspired” work, suggesting the only place with foundries capable of realising a project on this scale and speed would be China. Alibaba prepare!

Trump’s construction mania is all-consuming. He uses press conferences to show off his latest renovations and has spoken of how building is the “fun” thing he does to relax, in between kidnapping South American presidents, bombing the Middle East and bullying Greenland. But White House insiders say his therapeutic hobby has become the policy priority, a massive drain on the administration’s energies and resources.

The Resolute desk has never seen so many samples and swatches – whether marble for the Lincoln bathroom, golden drapes for the East Room, or the “million-year lifespan” pavers for the driveway – a White House shopping list that now tops $900m. The Oval Office looks like a developer’s showroom, most recently displaying a two-metre model of Trump’s $22bn makeover of Dulles airport, boasting gold-mirrored ceilings and “the largest garage in the world”.

The closer autocrats come to their end, the more frenziedly do they build. Nero embarked on a golden palace before he was driven to suicide. Marie Antoinette built a model hamlet before she was beheaded. Hitler pored over architectural plans in his bunker during his final days. Trump is buried in catalogues of fixtures and fittings, busy inspecting the workmanship of his helipad-cum-cocktail patio, as the country crumbles around him.