Erasing the Past

The MAGA sack of Washington, the desecration of the White House in particular, will be what symbolizes the Trump era in American history from this time forward. Although it took place several weeks ago in late October and has been superseded by numerous other outrages, the bad taste lingers; it’s a constant reminder of all the offensive goings-on that have transpired in recent months, one piled on top of another.

The dictatorship’s depredations are too numerous to reiterate here; they’re like the laundry list of proposals that accompany your average State of the Union address. But they do fall into several broad categories:  attacks on the social safety net, especially its healthcare provisions; attacks on the public institutions of government, either by hollowing them out or killing them outright; enhancement of the wealth and power of the privileged few at the expense of the many, particularly in the areas of taxation and regulation; the use of domestic military or paramilitary forces to pursue extralegal actions abroad and quash civil liberties at home.

A prominent recent manifestation of the dictatorship in action was the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), sponsor of Ken Burns’ epic documentary of the American Revolution on its 250th anniversary, CPB’s last gasp in major programming. It’s something Donald Trump should have watched, though I’m sure he didn’t, despite his constant invoking of what he terms patriotism. In any case, the contrast between 1775 and 2025 — sacrifice versus self-aggrandizement, idealism versus cynicism, democratic values versus autocratic ones — would have hardly registered.

The MAGA mindset, like that of an earlier generation of authoritarianism, can be summed up neatly in a quote by right-wing industrialist Henry Ford: “History is bunk.” Ford’s summation applies to the White House in our time as well and suggests that what’s been done to it is of concern only to a cultural elite. It’s certainly not a concern to those in charge.

What’s important to today’s ruling clique is the purely materialistic — in a word, money. That and power, of course. Their hope and expectation is that the mass of Americans (the people already paying 55% of the Trump tariffs, according to an October economic report) can be bought off with a few scattered giveaways, such as selective tariff cuts on coffee, bananas and Argentine beef, or deficit-financed $2,000 checks (good for a month’s rent or a mortgage payment), or better still, the establishment of 50-year home mortgages. The last-named would allow Mr. and Mrs. Average Homeowner to pay off their humble abode by age 90 or so, after decades of added interest payments. It’s all a 21st century version of Ancient Rome’s bread and circuses.

Speaking of the Romans, nothing calls to mind the razing of the White House East Wing more than the sack of Rome in the fifth century.  The invading barbarians, the Germanic tribes that proliferated on the outer fringes of the Empire toward its final demise, entered the Eternal City in A.D. 410 under the leadership of Alaric, King of the marauding Visigoths.

In his classic “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” historian Edward Gibbon described the barbarians’ fascination with gold (very Trumpian), followed by silver, jewels and silk cloth. Works of art interested them not at all and were routinely damaged or destroyed. Statues were melted down for their precious metals. Public buildings and private homes were ransacked or set afire. The barbarians were after treasure and loot; Roman “civilization” and institutions were not their concern. After six days of pillaging, they left with all they could carry.

Alaric and his Visigoths would have understood MAGA world and its plundering billionaire class. So would Napoleon Bonaparte. The French dictator at least left behind a legal code, but he also built a vainglorious monument to himself, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, to commemorate his military successes.

Donald Trump wants a similar “triumphal arch” for the U.S. capital celebrating his immortal reign. Additionally, of course, there would be his privately financed, $400 million gilded ballroom-cum-banquet hall replacing the demolished East Wing and dwarfing the adjoining White House, an expression of the primacy of America’s rich and powerful.  Together, these overbearing edifices would help mark Washington as an imperial city.

That’s not what the Founders had in mind. Their vision was of modest public structures in the neoclassical style, as befitted an anti-monarchist country inspired by the Roman republic and the democracy of Ancient Greece.

The White House, designed by Irish-American architect James Hoban (an immigrant) and based on Dublin’s Leinster House, home of the Irish parliament, was one example. It was built between 1792 and 1800, then modified seamlessly with colonnades, also in neoclassical style, by President Thomas Jefferson and his architect Benjamin Latrobe - - after initial proposals for an executive “grand palace” were explicitly rejected.

Other changes were made over the years, mostly to accommodate gradual governmental expansion, but nothing on a Trumpian scale with its bulldozer approach to renovation. Stylistically, the worst took place in the original Gilded Age, when the Chester Arthur administration (1881-84) redecorated the White House interior in garish Victorian mode, anticipating Donald Trump’s Second Gilded Age by plastering the walls and ceilings with gold, silver and jeweled accoutrements.

A rescue was performed by Teddy Roosevelt, who, besides adding the building’s East and West wings in 1901-02, banished the last vestiges of tacky Victorianism. T.R., a practicing historian, returned the White House to its classical origins, restoring its interior to, in his words, “what it was planned to be by Washington.”

In 1949-51, Harry Truman oversaw necessary structural updating and repairs to the executive mansion without altering its essential character. A decade later, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy famously refurbished the White House interior in period style using antiques and museum-quality materials based on extensive research.

None of the 20th century alterations took place without professional and public input, and all were carried out with congressionally authorized funding.  In contrast to the present occupant, who thinks the White House is his personal property, prior presidents understood they were responsible tenants holding it in trust; they knew they inhabited the people’s house, not Mar-a-Lago north, a playpen for connected plutocrats.

As for the ugly, oversized, gold-encrusted ballroom the self-entitled plutocrats would pay for and use, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Public Citizen have filed timely lawsuits in U.S. District Court challenging its legitimacy. Stay tuned.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.