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Your Guide to What the 2024 US Election Means for Washington and the World
Who is currently in charge in the US? Jill Biden? Kamala Harris? Paper President Joe Biden? Or is it actually President-elect Donald Trump? Many signs point to the latter, not least the undeniable reality that the center of American political power has already shifted some 1,000 miles to the south: from the grand neoclassical designs of the White House and the Capitol to the gold-toy-Louis-XIV shrine of Mar -a-Lago.
When Marjorie Merriweather Post—the breakfast cereal heiress who commissioned the Florida resort a century ago—left Mar-a-Lago to the federal government after her death in 1973, the administration at the time decided it wasn’t worth the trouble or the expenses. The estate was returned to the Post Foundation, which sold it to Trump in 1985. He turned it into a private members’ club in 1994. But Post’s idea of a “Winter White House” finally became a reality during his first term. 45th president. And despite not being 47 yet, the description now seems more fitting than ever.
In recent weeks, a steady stream of billionaires, politicians and other forms of power brokers and sycophants have passed through the Palm Beach palace. Elon Musk seems to have decamped there semi-permanently. Techno-romantic entrepreneur Marc Andreessen says he is – how altruistic – spending half his time at the club to “help”. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and treasurer Nick Candy have been pictured there, smiling alongside Musk.
And why wouldn’t they? I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago a few times and, contrary to popular belief, it’s mostly very tasteful. Trump is praised by members and locals for maintaining the original features. No one sees ketchup dripping down the walls. The only signs that you’re on his property — rather than any other glitzy private club — are the “TRUMP” WI-FI network. the TRUMP crest (changed from INTEGRITAS when he took office) emblazoned on everything from napkins to doormats. the framed magazine covers on the entryway walls. and, yes, that rather unflattering portrait at the bar.
Trump instinctively understands what other politicians struggle to get their heads around, including the power of how things look. And a beautiful private members’ club on a pristine, sun-dappled, palm-dotted strip of land is an attractive invitation — even to the already very wealthy (and even if the menu and music selection haven’t changed in nearly two decades, as I members say).
He understands that having a glamorous backdrop for announcements and interviews makes him look presidential when he’s not even in office. Indeed, you only have to look at Trump Tower in Manhattan, with its 34-inch-high brass capital letters above the entrance, to see how powerfully the former real estate developer uses architecture as propaganda.
This thought came to me while watching a screening of it stardust, a delightful new documentary about the postmodernist architectural power couple Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (I moderated a discussion at the Barbican with the filmmakers, one of whom is the son of Venturi and Scott Brown). “It’s all propaganda,” Scott Brown says in the film, mischievously comparing ancient Greek temples to Las Vegas billboards. “Would you rather be sold religion or soap? I would go for soap.”
The question of what exactly the American right is trying to sell in its crusade against modern architecture in recent years is an interesting one. Earlier this year, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on a Roger Scruton-esque rant about how “postmodern” architecture is “designed to discourage moral and . . . destroy your spirit.”
And in 2020 Trump himself, a man who made his fortune building towers, signed an executive order stating that all new federal buildings must be “beautiful.” The order (later rescinded by Biden) also decried the “incongruous mix of classical and modernist designs” seen in many federal buildings—an odd complaint, perhaps, from a man who has a Versailles-style apartment in the penthouse of a skyscraper, but then the Trump never worries too much about consistency.
It boils down to selling the idea that traditional conservative values are the only thing that can save America and nostalgia for a country that no longer exists. I’m sympathetic to the idea that buildings should be beautiful, although I don’t believe Trump’s promised “golden age of America” will materialize. With his gilded winter White House, however, he feigns the influence of peddlers and oligarchs greedily swirling around him that he can. For them, indeed, it already has.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
