Donald Trump, White Trash Icon
One of the most remarkable things about the Old Days is that there were Americans with taste. Today, Americans appreciate bad taste, or America wouldn’t look the way America does. Enough has already been said about Trump and his shitty taste, his awful manners his gross appearance, the garbage of his personality, and what we surmise are his astronomical outstanding credit card balances — because you know how New Money always has to parade itself around in front of you like a dumb peacock. But there is more to say.
Trump’s bad taste is typical of a large swath of Americans. Not like he necessarily dresses the way most Americans do, in gigantic suits with a cut and a sheen of a drunk Bombay tailor and inexplicably long, shiny neckties in Bus and Tunnel colors the have to be held down with tape (it is hard to believe that this vulgar hair-weave troglodyte made his home in NYC, though).
There are no ways in which Americans will not go sartorially awry. Ill-fitting T-shirts that showcase somewhere they’ve been or a feat accompli, like ‘NYC Marathon’ or ‘Columbus Zoo’, or “2008 World Champions”. Khakis with puffy pleats, shorts past the ankles, which makes them, well, pants. On-air sport’s broadcasters dress up like comic book super villains. College football team logos slammed on jumbo-sized shirts and sweatshirts, socks, hats and jackets. The old and the new mixing freely; confusedly, and unencumbered by the rigid aesthetic diktats of village life. The result is an embarrassment of bewildering sartorial neologisms, only to be found in America. Several decades of economic ruin and sports frustration can make anyone loathe to change out of sweatpants, but must we be turned into a Crimson Tide penal colony?
Every successful brand needs an aesthetic, and Donald Trump has spent decades cultivating his, a theme of “conspicuous consumption”*. Trump’s best-known asset is Trump Tower, a brassy-déclassé 58-story skyscraper with a horrible huge pleated façade threatening 5th Avenue in Manhattan valued at $371 million. The top three floors are his personal Penthouse, the theme of which is Success! Just in case you weren’t sure about Donald Trump’s Success!, he’s planted two ridiculously giant doors encrusted in both gold and diamonds, beyond where a blaze of vulgarity awaits. It looks less suited to native new Yorker, and more to a Saudi prince. Or a Russian oligarch.
NYC is a gallery of famous displays of wealth by robber barons and social climbers of the late 19th include the the railroad tycoon Vanderbilt’s r “Petit chateau” on Fifth Avenue, and the mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In the older days, the uber rich surrounded themselves with the very best furniture, porcelain and art created for the nobles of the French Court in the 17th and 18th century in the pursuit of social acceptance from high society. Trump has no such ambitions. His sensationally hideous trappings show he is not of the “old order”. This adds to his appeal for those who feel forgotten by the established elite. Trump wants the aesthetic of flamboyant patrons of the gilded age, but unlike the European-style salons designed for the new money of the late-19th and early-20th centuries filled with genuine treasures, nothing in Trump’s interiors are real. He owns all phonies.
Mr Trump conflates “over the top” with “luxury” and “expensive” with “quality”. Everything is “repro.” Repro gilded French furniture, New, shiny marble, of course, not the worn, “used”old stuff. But where wealthy industrialists and bankers of yore sought to attain social prestige by association with authentic objects that belonged to a lost world of ancien-règime France, Trump’s interiors mimic the only the most superficial aspects of French Court art. His penthouse boasts humongous canopy beds, fresco-style ceilings and colossal chandeliers, a bronze statue of Eros and Psyche. ** Louis XIV-inspired furniture, wrongly proportioned, over-scaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking “historical” detailing. Shiny surfaces, ginormous gold and glass chandeliers and giant golden mirrors. marble coats walls and floors and tabletops, every square inch of the bathrooms. Uncomfortable looking furniture, spaces far apart. the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche. It’s little surprise that the substantive current design was done by Henry Conversano, a casino designer.
America is a design illiterate country, identity-lacking building that dominates much of the American landscape hence our architecture is one of banal oppression. Architects turned their backs on suburbia long ago, and suburbia responded by designing for itself. We wantonly tear down actual older homes and rebuilt tomes that are “inspired” by French chateaus, Spanish villas or, alarmingly, early American plantations. What says “successful American” better than an ersatz Monticello? Modern homes are often a mash-up of disparate architectural styles with little regard for geography or history. As opposed to the symmetry of, say, a classic Colonial-style house — with the front door in the middle and windows placed evenly on either side — new American homes have irregular features that confuse the eye. Garages that dwarf the house. Bombastic entrances, with stretched columns or oversize pediments (or both). Key design features that aren’t even amenable to human comfort. The uncozy “great room” with insanely high ceilings, stress including non-rectangular rooms. It’s like a bricolage of elements chosen to impress non-existent guests. Chandeliers, columns and de facto lobbies, that are drawn on the architecture of banks.
There is simply no quality control for architecture in an age of building boom similar to that of the post-depression 1930s. It is an architecture identified by the profit that can be made from it rather than the community it can build or ideology it can inspire. In a country where the haute couture of housing is a couple of Texas rubes jumbling bewilderingly trendy faux farmhouse touches like distressed wood with subway tiles and more clocks than a 19th-century train station architect, we are setting a very low barre.
Donald trump owns little to no “art” (He has often bragged about his “original Renoir,” which and a reproduction of Renoir’s “La Loge” painting used to “hang’ in one of his jets and now keeps in Trump Tower. Despite all the times he’s been told that it is copy, and that the original hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, he insists it’s real (“just look at the signature, tells people). FACT: Painter Thomas Kinkade’s nauseating fantasies are said to hang in one out of every 20 homes in America.
Donald Trump’s lavish Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago, was built in 1927 by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post for $7 million. Marion Sims Wyeth, noted for designing many of Florida’s signature Gilded Age mansions, oversaw the project. But Post’s insistence on the late-stage participation of Joseph Urban, a scenic designer for the Ziegfield Follies is what turned a masterpiece into a monstrosity in the eyes of many architectural critics. She shared her private realm during wartime as a hospital, foreshadowing what she expected might be one of her lasting legacies: Her dream of having Mar-a-Lago repurposed for a greater good, as a presidential retreat and sanctuary for visiting heads of state. The government did not want to maintain the property and returned it to the Post estate who sold it to Donald Trump in 1985 for a mere $5 million, who then immediately ruined it. Mar-a-Lago the private club, includes a “Louis XIV-style” ballroom containing $7 million in gold leaves and countless different gold-plated sinks and shitters. There is a “library”, filled with rare first-edition books that no one in the family ever read.
Dictators might work in the grand styles of earlier centuries -Italian Renaissance, Napoleonic, or French baroque – but they never use anything actually old -materials and furniture. Old is dirty and shabby! Old isn’t fancy! Everything is brand spanking new. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, comes from the author of book called Dictator Style
In the 1970s, Donald Trump – in his only bona fide real-estate success – ruined Grand Central Station’s Commodore Hotel, turning it into a Grand Hyatt. Named after “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of The New York Central Railroad System, the Commodore Hotel opened in 1919. At the time, its much-admired lobby (which had a waterfall) was the largest room in the city. Trump coated the handsome neo-French Renaissance tower with cheap glazing—the epitome of seventies smoked glass coffee tables to hoover cocaine from, except all its surfaces are vertical. Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, named for the noble white mausoleum in Uttar Pradesh and which author Harper Lee slammed as “the worst punishment God can devise”, after a visit in 1990 named its vulgar suites after Napoleon, Kublai Khan and Alexander the Great. Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is encased in “24-carat-gold-infused glass”. Crystal chandeliers and Italian marble adorn the lobby of that hotel as they do every one of his properties. The bathrooms on the Trump Shuttle, his ill-fated airline, were fitted with gold-plated faucets. He wanted marble sinks, but had to be informed that that would make the planes too heavy to fly.
“A real dump,” is how Donald Trump is said to have described the White House he inherited from the Obama administration. So he took the opportunity of his summer vacation to call in the decorators for a $3.4m (£2.6m) overhaul, the results of which have been unveiled this week.
Over at the White House – which the Obamas filled with modern and contemporary art by Josef Albers and Robert Rauschenberg and installing sculptures by native and African American artists – Trump has filled with eagles. More lustre, more glory. According to the philosophy of Trumpitecture, lustre and glory come in the form of gold drapes (installed in January) and gold-hued upholstery, both of which now adorn the president’s office.
6,000 metres of new carpet that looks like it has been lifted straight from a mid-range chain hotel have been rolled out across the WH to replace the plain old Obama-brown carpet. It’s better for hiding the piss stains.
In the 1970’s, he Carters favored solar panels and button-down sweaters to save on the heating bill in the White House. Rosalynn eschewed ostentation and favored frugality: inexpensive dinner menus, no hard alcohol, and simple, non-designer clothing. The New Money Reagans roared into Washington at the dawn of the 1980s —with yuppies, glittering excess, a skyrocketing Dow, broad-shouldered power suits, and a “let ’em eat cake” attitude. The American capital was designed specifically to avoid Europe’s autocratic excesses, projecting a message of simplicity, democracy and egalitarianism. The Reagans didn’t understand that, and their design aesthetic was fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present, alarmingly un-American. But 2016 ushered in a new, more disgusting era.
Trump’s success is driven by the American, non-urban, blue-collar lout, who are ridiculously, pathetically, embarrassingly suggestible. Trump’s grotesque display of wealth is meant to be aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. Conservative Middle Class Americans aspire to be rich assholes, no matter how ludicrously unrealistic. Donald Trump has been able to exploit a demographic that is as integral to American identity as the Founding Fathers. As a billionaire reviled by other billionaires, Trump was enabled to tap into the misplaced rage of a disaffected Middle America.
If allowed to, Donald Trump will litter the landscape with thousands of Trump casinos, hotels, and resorts. In America, but also in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Raqqa, Kandahar, and Gaza. Then all of them will go bankrupt the way Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts did. He’ll destroy the power of our foes leaving Russia trying to palm off Eastern Ukraine on angry bond-holders and China auctioning distressed property in the Spratly Islands. He must be stopped.
*”Conspicuous consumption” was coined by 19th-century sociologist Thorstein Veblen to explain the extravagant displays of railroad magnets and robber barons. Veblen argued that open acts of extravagant spending were a means of establishing the real or perceived power and prestige of individuals who held an otherwise precarious social position.
**Eros is the son Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Aphrodite is upset with Psyche, a human princess, and instructs Eros to maker her fall in love with something hideous. Instead, Eros falls in love with Psyche and eventually makes her fall in love with him even though he’s invisible.