His policies and behavior may often baffle, but he is a developer at heart.
The future president in Trump Tower circa 1987.
(Getty)
Architecture may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump. But real estate development is so central to his backstory that the built environment may be key to deciphering his whole political project—and, crucially, the difference between his two administrations. After all, from tariffs to deportations to attacks on the academy to environmental deregulation, there is not a single action he’s taken as president that does not affect architecture. During his first administration, he concentrated on fueling the culture wars, typified by his 2020 executive order on “promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.” Opposition to Trump 1.0 also often took place on aesthetic rather than political grounds. This time around, it is more useful to understand Trump as an anti-architectural president.
He’s reissued a soupier version of his traditional architecture order, but that now seems like mere flotsam in a roiling sea. All areas of the field are now under existential threat after the administration’s chaotic first three months, which saw illegal firings, bewildering executive orders, and draconian crackdowns on immigration and free speech. But Trump’s architectural vision has changed dramatically since his last time in office. Culture wars are no longer needed, because their arbiters have already won. Those who dedicated their livelihoods to advancing the causes of “traditional design” are now themselves recipients of the “fell for it again” award, as their concerns are far down on an impossibly long list of the man’s grievances. For all of architecture, trad and otherwise, what comes now is punishment through decimation. The field is unprepared for the fallout.
For too long, architecture—from the academy to the firm—has pictured itself as a technocratic, largely apolitical field with some progressive overtones (building a better world through design, etc.). The reality is that, more often than not, buildings—beautiful as they may be—serve as handmaidens to real estate development and existing instruments of wealth and power. There are, of course, bright spots: a longtime dedication to environmental efficiency and climate resilience (albeit with mixed results), and of course the form-making and innovation inherent to the field as an aesthetic practice. But those are doomed to be casualties in Trump’s fight that primarily targets any kind of progressive group and goal.
So what are the real goals? It’s telling that the academy was Trump 2.0’s first foray into architectural intervention. As always, Palestine was the canary in the coal mine. Soon after the president took office, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)—the representative body of architecture schools around the world—suddenly canceled an issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) titled “Palestine” at the 11th hour. They also sacked McLain Clutter, the journal’s interim editor. The announcement read:
The ACSA board decided the risks from publishing the issue have significantly increased as a result of new actions by the U.S. presidential administration as well as other actions at state levels. These substantial risks include personal threats to journal editors, authors, and reviewers, as well as to ACSA volunteers and staff. They also include legal and financial risks facing the organization overall.
Journalist Zach Mortice detailed the episode extensively in The Architect’s Newspaper, revealing the extent of the organization’s cowardice and complicity. ACSA, caving to right-wing pressure from both within and without, undermined itself through actions like leaking the call for papers before it was formally announced—allowing right-wing pro-Israel groups, many of which have nothing to do with architecture, to preemptively level the same bad-faith accusations of antisemitism weaponized against pro-Palestine sentiment everywhere. Furthermore, ACSA’s own legal counsel, Jeffery P. Altman of Whiteford, Taylor & Preston, also serves as the general counsel for the Republican Jewish Coalition, “which on March 2 issued a press release praising President Trump for expediting $4 billion of military aid to Israel,” though the ACSA claims it was not informed of this connection. A swath of resignations followed this rug pull, including both ACSA board members and some faculty at schools including Portland State University in solidarity with Clutter.
Shortly after the JAE debacle, Trump descended upon universities, beginning with Columbia, which has one of the most left-wing architecture theory departments in the country. Shortly before the taking of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the first victims of student deportations was Ranjani Srinivasan, a researcher from India studying urban planning on a student visa at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Last year, Srinivasan happened to be passing through one of the pro-Palestine encampments on her way home, when she was accidentally arrested by police and soon cleared of all charges. Earlier this year, her student visa was revoked and Immigration and Customs Enforcement made repeated trips to her apartment without a warrant. Srinivasan chose to book a flight and escape to Canada. She’s not alone. Last week, an anonymous architecture student at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture also fled the country after the Department of Homeland Security revoked their visa. Troubling reports like the detainment of a pro-Palestinian student demonstrator’s defense counsel keep emerging to suggest that Palestine is the pretext Trump will use to target universities at any cost.
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Palestine also offers a window into Trump’s broader development goals. To the horror of the world’s governments, he’s advocated the US takeover of the Gaza Strip and the forced relocation of the area’s remaining Palestinians. In February, the president posted a controversial AI-generated video showing the rubble of Gaza transforming into a gaudy, palm-lined resort with the words “Trump Gaza” emblazoned on it. Not merely monstrous and tacky, this kind of stunt actually illuminates his broader vision for the built environment and unites several different, seemingly conflicting policies.
Take the tariffs, which are about to kneecap many industries, architecture among them. A 135 percent tariff on China will affect a huge number of building products, everything from windows to laminate flooring, and the 35 percent tariff on Canadian lumber will hurt developers the hardest, as the majority of buildings in the United States are built using wood framing. Meanwhile, the deportation of Central and South American immigrants removes a large swath of the construction workforce (revealing what has always been an exploitative and unfair division of labor within the field). All of this means the quality and quantity of new construction is poised to plummet. Despite all the bluster about restoring American-made products, these changes will also have deleterious effects on architectural forms. Complex formal explorations are a luxury; they’re what firms do when they’re less constrained by the bottom line. (This is why most formally ambitious projects are backed by public funding, such as museums— RIP.) Tariffs will ensure that real estate development and the housing and home improvement markets will all suffer—but none of that seems to matter to President Deals, who is more concerned with a larger project for which architecture is one of many sacrifices.
To speculate on one of the many reasons Trump is so keen on tariffs, look at one of the nations he admires most: Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia (and Russia as well) dole out government money not by collecting taxes but through a centralized, state-owned body called a sovereign wealth fund. One possibility Trump may be considering is setting up such a fund and sustaining it entirely through tariffs, thus eliminating income tax entirely, a concept backed by the arch-libertarian Cato Institute. But it’s more than just economic structures he wishes to borrow from the Saudis—it’s how they run their country. Specifically, it’s how they combine extractive power (i.e., oil), a technocratic surveillance state, and investment in sports teams and large luxury developments such as resorts as a way of building soft power. By gutting environmental regulations, Trump already hopes to return the US to being a major exporter of fossil fuels.
However, his way of building imperial power is not softly, e.g., through organizations such as USAID, but through neo-imperial land grabs in Greenland and Gaza. The idea of Gaza as a resort has been floated before by Netanyahu. I’ve written about it in this magazine. Here, however, it acts as a synthesis of Trump’s old identity as a failed casino owner and golf course peddler mixed with the authoritarian impulse to aid and abet other authoritarians. These obscene AI-generated “plans” for Gaza communicate either an exaggerated notion of wealth (gold statues of Trump, crowds tossing US dollars into the air) or progress (solar farms, glassy buildings, and windmills).
If the architectural language of the previous administration was a McMansionized Oval Office (which, to be fair, has returned in Trump 2.0 via a slew of gold appliqués tacked on to fireplaces and doorways) and be-columned federal buildings, the architectural language of this one is far more sinister. But more so even than AI-generated slop, the quintessential architectural object of Trump’s second term is the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador. CECOT, a kind of carceral version of an Amazon warehouse, is gray and overlit. We’ve all seen those photos, which have a vaguely pornographic quality, in which rows of shirtless men, shaved bald and shackled, are arranged like puzzle pieces. There’s one where they’re crammed into a cell, in front of which a heavily made-up Kristi Noem grins and poses. This is the most honest prospective rendering of Trump’s architectural future. For him, this porn-ified, carceral vision is a necessary precondition for all the gilded toilets destined for the bathrooms of imperial decline. All else must suffer in service to this intermediate step of barbarism and violence, after which the glory days of American-made iPhones and post–ethnic cleansing resort towns can come to pass. Whether you protested for Palestine or simply wanted skyscrapers to be LEED-certified, you will be caught in this same dragnet.
Times like these make the importance of architectural criticism urgent and explicit. Discussing matters of aesthetics is no longer enough in Trump 2.0. The problem with Trump is not that he is tacky and lazy but that he is evil. His plans expose the weaknesses in architecture that were always there—its reliance on unequal divisions of labor and exploitation both at home and abroad, its purported liberalism that stops short of real activism, its flimsy attempts to balance ecological goals with developer profits. There is a path forward being shown to us by the contributors to JAE, who now find themselves in exile. At the ACSA conference (to which I was invited but declined to attend in solidarity), many of the members involved in Palestinian issues met up with Dark Matter U, an organization devoted to more equitable practices in architecture schools, and held counterprotests and events of their own, showing us that the path forward in undemocratic times is to resist, reject, and form new institutions now that the old ones will no longer save us.
Every community member who protests ICE and tries to protect their neighbors, every group practicing mutual aid after disasters, every journalist risking their livelihood at home and abroad, every worker unionizing their workplace: These are the cardinal directions architecture should look toward. Hence, in this moment, we must all become architecture critics. All things are architecture, and architecture is connected to all things. As frightening as criticism may be, one must always remember that politics, like buildings, must be erected, and once they are erected, they must be maintained. I refuse to contribute to such vile maintenance, and so should you.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.
In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.
We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.
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The Editors
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