The roundabout known as Memorial Circle, at the west end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, is among the more forgettable patches of public grass in Washington, D.C.—one that drivers whizz past on their way into Virginia or over the Potomac River toward the Lincoln Memorial. This spring, surveyors staked it out with pink flags, mapping the site of what President Donald Trump has promised “will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World.”
In the Roman era, passing through a free-standing arch—its attic and friezes crowded with reliefs depicting military victories and the spoils of war—meant taking a historical tour of some of the empire’s greatest triumphs. The aim of the so-called Independence Arch is less clear. The 250-foot-tall structure is supposedly intended to honor America’s semiquincentennial, but when asked whom it’s being built for, Trump replied, “Me.” (Some observers have thus taken to calling it the “Arc de Trump.”)
Trump, like a Roman emperor, is obsessed with building and renaming things in his honor. The arch has not begun construction, but the same can’t be said for his massive ballroom, for which he leveled the East Wing of the White House with nary an approval. Dulles International Airport may be next. Trump also had his name etched into the Kennedy Center (since removed, to comply with a court order) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (still there). He has plans for a National Garden of American Heroes on the National Mall, and he even wants people to think of him when they peer into the peeling, algae-infested Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
In Trump’s attempt to remake an already great capital, he brings to mind one twentieth-century leader in particular: Benito Mussolini.
If, when in Rome, you were to take the subway south from the historic center, past the point where noisy tourists thin out, you would surface in a sea of massive white marble and travertine buildings—a neighborhood almost too geometrically perfect, and eerily out of place in a city known for its narrow streets and warm ochre or burnt orange walls. This is the Esposizione Universale Roma, or EUR: a fascist, megalomaniacal dreamland founded by the Italian dictator in 1937.
Mussolini’s construction obsession, like Trump’s, was about etching himself into the historical record. (Il Duce also liked putting his name on things, like the obelisk in Rome’s Foro Italico—or the avenue beyond, which is paved with mosaics spelling out “DVCE” again and again.) The EUR was intended to prove Italy’s might and the success of fascism to the entire world: a sprawling exposition space for the 1942 World’s Fair, where Mussolini would receive representatives from every nation—not unlike Trump’s $600 million ballroom, where visiting heads of state will encounter gilded Corinthian columns and gold-inlaid ceilings. But the most revealing thing about the EUR, and what connects it most directly to Trump, is what Mussolini was trying to replace.
The mock-ups of the arch that were approved last month by the Trump-packed Commission of Fine Arts are pure neoclassical pastiche: a heavy attic with the inscription “One Nation Under God,” topped by a winged “Lady Liberty” flanked by two eagles (all three in gold, of course). It recalls a form perfected by Rome’s conquering generals and, much later, borrowed by Napoleon for the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The antecedent is precise, and almost every strongman since has been inspired by the same playbook, knowingly or not. But no one in the modern era understood the power of pulling from ancient architecture more instinctively than Mussolini.
“An architecture made of arches and columns is easily understandable by the masses,” explained Paolo Nicoloso, a historian and the author of Mussolini, Architect, which examines the dictator’s role in shaping major construction projects during the latter part of his reign.
Nicoloso notes that Mussolini, who ruled from 1922 until his execution in 1945, used architecture to perpetuate two narratives that were crucial to his power: that of Romanità or Romanness, the belonging to a great and civilizationally essential nation; and his own personal legend, as the man delivering or returning greatness to a people that had ostensibly been denied it. “Fascism governed through myths,” he said. “This myth made people believe that, after almost 2,000 years, a new people of world rulers, Mussolini’s Italians, was reborn with the regime” and was “once again set to dominate the world.”
At first, in seeking broad consent from the public, Mussolini’s government built schools, nurseries, opera houses, and homes for the disabled, but Nicoloso says Mussolini later pivoted to more “daring” projects, reaching for a more traditionalist style, closer to the classical idiom of Rome, to cement his rule. The EUR was to be the crowning achievement of his architectural projection of power, a celebration of 20 years of fascism and the rebirth of the new Roman Empire.
While he involved a coterie of the most brilliant architects of his era, Mussolini was also personally invested in the EUR, conceiving it as a modern reinvention of imperial glory fused with rationalism, Italy’s answer to the international modern movement—a synthesis the regime would name the Stile Littorio. Today, walking down the wide boulevards flanked by leggy Roman pines, the effect is both impressive and jarring: The form is unmistakably ancient and familiar, yet the scale and the cold geometric repetition feel subtly, deliberately alien. It is, in a word, uncanny.
The best example and the area’s most remarkable monument is the six-story Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Romans call it the Square Colosseum, which tells you most of what you need to know: It’s exactly what you would get if you compressed the most famous round arena on earth into a rectangular box and stood it on one end. What better way to make an impact on the masses than to put your own twist on one of the most striking ancient landmarks in the world?
The palace highlights the absurdity of the entire project. Mussolini was ruling from Rome, one of the most beautiful, historically significant cities in the world, and the actual Colosseum was a few miles up the road, not to mention real imperial ruins scattered across the city. And yet, he decided that the city he ruled needed a new center, built by him, that would make everything that came before look like a prelude to his arrival. So he spent a fortune raising a second Rome on the edge of the first—because the past, to be useful, had to be remade as his.
Rather than accepting his place in a long line of leaders who had shaped the city before him, Mussolini wanted to eclipse them entirely by moving Rome’s center of gravity away from the legacy of everyone who had come before him and anchor it to himself instead. Trump is doing the exact same in D.C. Where previous presidents understood themselves as stewards of an institution greater than themselves, and were honored to become part of a long line of American presidents, Trump wants to be its culmination—the most important name in a city full of important names.
Mussolini, like Trump, had plans to build a triumphal arch of sorts in the EUR, to be called the Arch of the Empire—a towering parabola of steel and aluminum, not unlike the Gateway Arch built in St. Louis in the early 1960s. It never got built, like much of what Mussolini had planned for the EUR: Construction of the district began in 1938 and continued through Italy’s entry into the war in 1940, but fighting drained the regime’s resources and the 1942 World’s Fair was ultimately canceled.
Only one building was fully completed before the war: the Palazzo degli Uffici, whose entrance still bears a bas-relief depicting Rome’s history from Romulus and Remus through to Mussolini himself, on horseback, at the bottom. The other half-finished marble palaces were occupied by the Germans after the fascist government fell in 1943, then by the Allies after Germany’s defeat. The postwar Italian government—backed by Washington, which preferred Christian Democrats to antifascist partisans and Communists, who would have likely razed it to the ground—finished the neighborhood in time for the 1960 Olympics, sticking to Mussolini’s original plans. The bones of the quarter remained his, and the idea of EUR endured.
The myth of Mussolini the tireless builder, founder of cities, survived the man precisely because his buildings all over the country did. Architecture, the most patient form of propaganda, kept making its case long after the propagandist was gone and his ideology shunned. That, no doubt, is also the 80-year-old Trump’s intention.
Nicoloso is careful not to flatten the comparison between Mussolini and Trump. The latter, he emphasized, is volatile in a way Mussolini was not, and it is hard to know whether his plans for the Memorial Circle arch “reflect a coherent plan or merely a whim.” That Trump should reach for classical architecture, “a time-tested, age-old instrument of power in the digital age, is certainly striking,” Nicoloso remarked, but he added: “I doubt that the extraordinary fascination that architecture held for the masses a century ago has the same hold on digital man today.”
The ideologues behind Trump’s construction push suffer no such hesitation. Chief among them is Justin Shubow, president of a small Washington nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, who helped draft Trump’s executive order last August titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” a revival of a near-identical order from Trump’s first term, which President Joe Biden scrapped.
A critic rather than a practicing architect, Shubow has long argued that the architecture of American democracy was hijacked some 75 years ago by a modernist elite contemptuous of “ordinary people,” and calls brutalism, the raw-concrete style of midcentury government buildings, “aesthetic pollution.” Praising Trump’s order, he wrote that “since the mid-20th century, Modernist mandarins controlling government architecture have been forcing ugly designs upon us.”
Shubow’s argument has genuine populist purchase because it is half true. Federal Washington is overwhelmingly neoclassical, and the midcentury turn to modernism was a real break from it. Americans associate government buildings with columns and domes because that is what they mainly were and are today. (And to be fair, Shubow’s view of Washington’s brutalist buildings is widely held among locals.)
The Founders saw their fragile new republic as the heir to Athens and republican Rome, and they wanted the buildings to say so. Thomas Jefferson modeled Virginia’s Capitol building on a Roman temple precisely to claim that lineage in stone. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the earlier memorials along the Mall used classicism as an argument that the United States belonged among the self-governing republics of antiquity.
“Monuments can do different kinds of work politically under different circumstances,” said Reinhold Martin, a professor of architecture at Columbia University and co-editor of Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International.
Martin draws a distinction between buildings that mainly do something and buildings that mainly mean something. The dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, built under the New Deal, are monumental as well as functional, public works for the general welfare. “In the case that we’re faced with now in the United States, we’re dealing mostly with symbols,” he explained. Referring to Trump and his cronies, Martin added, “In the world of architectural language, they are trying to transcend to a previous era and identify with ancient classicism, what they perceive as the heart and soul of the civilization, which is usually some form of mythic civilization.”
For Martin, the style is not the scandal so much as the spirit behind it. Gold laid on gold, a ballroom bolted onto the White House where the East Wing once stood, grandeur measured by the ounce, an arch meant to overshadow both the monuments of the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery. He calls it “a form of barbaric kitsch, because the term that applies most directly to these arches and the ballrooms is a kind of aesthetic barbarism.”
Trump’s obsession with building “classical” monuments is, like Mussolini’s was, an overcompensation his country doesn’t need. If he were the ruler of a small, young nation, the impulse to borrow historical grandeur by raising gilded Roman arches would at least partially make sense. But the United States, on the 250th anniversary of its independence, should be secure enough in its identity and culture not to have to ransack the pasts of other countries. France, after all, built the Arc de Triomphe during its imperial era, but it does not build new ones (well, not “classical ones,” anyway). Confident nations let their old monuments stand and build forward. The United States deserves a president with the vision to do that—or, at least, one who is less susceptible to revisionists and more concerned with building a public legacy that’s worth carving into marble.
