A Monument to Bad Taste

What if the National Mall were designed by a man who thinks gold toilets are classy

Among Donald Trump’s most consistent malfunctions is his complete lack of taste. Everything he touches seems to drift toward the aesthetic sensibilities of a casino lobby: excessive gold trim, oversized monuments, self-branding, and the kind of gaudy spectacle that mistakes expense for beauty. Since returning to office, he has reportedly covered parts of the White House in gold décor, bulldozed the Rose Garden, and fast-tracked plans for a massive ballroom on the White House grounds. Now comes another grandiose addition: a towering 250-foot flagpole on the Virginia side of the Potomac opposite the Lincoln Memorial — nearly the height of the U.S. Capitol itself.

And then there is the latest proposal involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where the granite foreground associated with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech would reportedly be coated with a commercial liner color marketed as “American Flag Blue,” the sort of material more commonly found in hotel swimming pools than national monuments.

To be fair, there is something oddly refreshing about the speed with which Trump operates. He does not spend years trapped in endless committees, public consultations, environmental reviews, and bureaucratic paralysis. One suspects that if Democrats were tasked with improving the National Mall for America’s 250th birthday, the process would involve twelve advisory boards, five land acknowledgments, and a decade of procedural gridlock before collapsing under its own costs.

The problem is not that Trump gets things done. The problem is that his instincts are terrible. America may end up renovated quickly, but like one of Trump’s casinos, it risks looking tacky, oversized, and permanently stamped with his name.