“Massive Eisenhower Memorial Could Break Ground as Early as September.” This alarming headline appeared the other day in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. The news is alarming because after years, and many, many millions of dollars, spent tinkering with “starchitect” Frank Gehry’s ludicrous plans for an Ike monument on the National Mall, the design remains what The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson has called it: “a deconstructionist fantasy,” a “sly insult to Dwight Eisenhower,” and “a pitiless joke.”
For all that, opposition to the proposed folly has fallen away, worn down by the relentless lobbying of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. It seems all that’s needed now is for Congress to come up with something north of $80 million. Oh yes, and President Trump will have to sign off on the expenditure. Eisenhower Commission spokeswoman Chris Cimko declared the group “confident” that Donald Trump would be eager to back their plans. “President Trump is a builder, and he is a Republican,” Cimko told Roll Call. “I can’t imagine that he doesn’t revere Ike.”
But as the paper is quite correct to point out, Trump doesn’t revere Gehry. Let us revisit the reasons—old and new—why.
Back in 2010, the Donald had bragging rights that his Trump World Tower was the Big Apple’s tallest residential building. That was until Gehry built an undulating 76-story steel shaft of a skyscraper on Spruce Street. Peeved, Trump wondered publicly if the building would be a financial success; Gehry responded, “I don’t like his hairdo.”
Once Trump was running for president, Gehry’s anti-Donald comments were more pointed. He was among the elites who threatened to leave the country were Trump elected; French president François Hollande said he would be welcomed in France (where they wouldn’t mind having him because not even Gehry could design anything as hideous as the Pompidou Centre). Not long after Trump was elected, the Canadian-born architect told an audience there, “I remember in 1937 and being in Canada and listening to Hitler’s speeches on radio—and this resounded similar to me. It’s just frightening.”
Does Trump really want to crown, with a monument on the Mall, the career of a man who just a couple of months ago was calling him a Hitler? Now, far be it from The Scrapbook to encourage anything so petty and vindictive as to tear up the Gehry design out of spite. No, of course not: The Scrapbook encourages the decision be made on purely aesthetic grounds.
Speaking of aesthetics, did we mention that Gehry made fun of Trump’s haircut?
