"President Trump’s attempt to hugely expand the White House is lumbering forward. It suffered the tiniest of setbacks when the National Capital Planning Commission decided to postpone a vote on the project to its next meeting, on April 2. But it is highly unlikely that the commission, which has been stocked with Trump appointees, will not ultimately sign off on this enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries."

"As Mussolini misunderstood Rome, Mr. Trump misunderstands Washington. 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. The White House is a mansion, not a palace; 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 not before this past year — gilded."

"Like Mussolini, Mr. Trump grasps at things that he thinks will express the strength of his regime but that only show its vulgarity."

—Paul Goldberger is a former architecture critic for The Times and The New Yorker and the author of “Why Architecture Matters.”
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