Trump’s other big project 'something more deranged' than just bad taste

President Donald Trump holds a model of an arch monument during a ballroom dinner in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., October 15, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The White House ballroom might be the giant, gaudy vanity project that is dominating President Donald Trump's mind the most, but it is far from the only one he is pursuing, and according to a new interview from the New York Times, that other project represents "something more deranged" than simply being in bad taste.

Alongside the $400 million (plus $1 billion) ballroom, the Trump administration is also forging ahead with the construction of a massive "triumphal arch," planned to be around 250 feet tall and 165 feet wide, and situated across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. Like the ballroom, the arch has been thoroughly rejected by voters in poll after poll, while critics have warned that the giant structure would be hugely out of scale with the rest of the city's landmarks and would obscure the view of some of them.

Owen Hatherley is an author who has written multiple books about the cross-section of politics and architecture. On Friday, the Times published an interview with him conducted by opinion editor John Guida. In speaking about Trump's various vanity construction projects, he did not hold back.

"On some level, it’s a provocation, a deliberate assault on good taste and sensibilities," Hatherley said, about the ballroom in particular, later adding, "What Trump is proposing is a fake 21st-century neoclassical annex to a largely 20th-century building that is bolted onto an extremely heavily altered original that had to be substantially redesigned by Thomas Jefferson in the first place because it wasn’t very good."

While Hatherley, a Brit, admitted to ultimately not understanding the attachment Americans feel towards the White House, on the subject of the arch, he said that it was "something else, something more deranged, and here it’s impossible to extricate it from the current war and the nonsense that the administration throws out about it on a daily basis."

Guida pressed in response to that comment, asking if the "triumphal" arch could be seen as similar to former President George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner and speech about the war on terror in 2003.

"Something like that — the mission has not been and will not be accomplished," Hatherley agreed.

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