President Trump is set to direct all new federal buildings in Washington, D.C., to be constructed in the classical style. The architectural community has been buzzing with outrage since an executive order leaked in early February, with reams of online articles (re)announcing the arrival of fascism going live as quickly as they could be uploaded. The order, titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” was supported by the National Civic Art Society, a small and pugnacious Washington nonprofit organization that advocates for traditionalist public architecture. It is most famous for lobbying against the celebrity architect Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial.

When I heard about this compulsory new crop of classical buildings, the word “kitsch” shot immediately into my mind, followed by a mental slideshow from history: There was Albert Speer’s Nazi neoclassicism, an architecture of rigid manliness as imagined by a fragile teenage boy; the Venetian hotel in Vegas, with its campy faux-opulence, halfheartedly aping a decadent kind of Roman grandeur; and finally, in a similar vein, Trump’s Manhattan penthouse — three floors of marble and gold paint, crowded with gaudy columns and frilly little ornaments, seemingly designed to announce the owner’s wealth, insecurity, and lack of taste.