Paul Goldberger on Trump & Mussolini, Washington & Rome

As Mussolini saw Rome as a mere shadow of its ancient self, Mr. Trump sees Washington as a city insufficiently grand for his ambitions. As a builder, he has always confused size with excellence [...] and when he looks at Washington, he probably really believes that it is a bit humdrum and lacking in panache, as if the founding fathers could not imagine something as noble as Mr. Trump has in mind.

"Washington was conceived as an expression of democracy, a place in which the largest and grandest public building was the Capitol, where the representatives of the people gathered," former NYT architecture critic Paul Goldberger writes in a new opinion essay for the paper, comparing Mussolini's power-hungry architectural ambitions in Rome with Donald Trump's barrage of Washington, D.C., makeover headlines. 

"The White House is a mansion, not a palace," Goldberger continues, "it is large compared with the average house of its time, but it was never intended to intimidate. In person, especially if you are used to the oligarchic great houses of the Gilded Age of a century ago or the ones that have gone up in the Hamptons in New York or Jackson Hole, Wyo., that typify the age we are living in now, it’s surprisingly human-scaled and lived in. The president resides upstairs, like a shopkeeper over the store of state. There is a simplicity to it, a restraint. And it is not — at least was ...