AS OF THIS WRITING, the storied East Wing of the White House is 10 days demolished. Without reviews or permissions, President Donald Trump ordered the demolition to make way for a 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom. To many, this action, taken without consultation or the permission of any authorizing agency, felt like a physical assault. Most criticism has been directed toward its Versailles-by-Hobby-Lobby interior, a gold-encrusted space intended for little else but to impress a rotating list of 999 high-rolling guests, who will then be impressed to pay tribute to the ballroom’s master. But let’s not let the interior’s tackiness, or its intent as a grift machine, distract us from the addition’s completely out-of-scale Imperial Rome-inspired exterior, for it is the exterior that provides a good example of how Trump and his minions so generously apply the lube of racism to allow the administration’s con to slide.
How is the exterior racist? In a word, eugenics, an ideology spawned at the end of the nineteenth century, nurtured in the first decades of the twentieth, and on full display in biology textbooks into the 1970s.
[Representative quotes highlighted.]
The intellectuality of Greece was maintained by the close inbreeding among its favored classes, as was also the political power of Rome. As soon as foreign marriages were sanctioned, and aliens and slaves were admitted to citizenship, the population became mongrelized, and its intellectuality declined.
E. Grace White, Ph.D., General Biology., 1937
Scientific American explains. In an October 2024 article headlined, “Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let’s Not,” authors Arthur Chaplin and James Tabery write, “Trump’s anti-immigrant good-gene-bad-gene screeds are nothing but factless eugenics for a new era,” and that “he has been spouting that nonsense for decades.”
Once assumed buried by the horrors of Nazism, eugenics, specifically the study of purported IQ differences between races, continued to burble below the surface in places like the quasi-academic journal Mankind Quarterly and other Pioneer Fund-supported initiatives. It resurfaced with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve, and is now promoted with the barest euphemistic cover by contemporary right-wing politicians and their monied supporters.
One of the reasons why Greece, Rome, and the other great nations of antiquity perished is that they violated the principles of eugenics. If our nation is to live its people must be of the best, and their blood must not be contaminated by that of the unfit.
Wm. H. Atwood, M.A., MS., Civic and Economic Biology, 1922
The mythology of civilizational decline was foundational to anti-immigration, anti-integration, anti-social support, and more generally, anti-difference public policy a century ago. Quotas, sterilization laws, and the second coming of the KKK were all animated by the so-called science. The civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, specifically the purported reasons for their fall, were held up as cautionary tales.
With the ballroom (and the triumphal arch and God knows what other compensatory monuments on the horizon), the Trump administration’s restoration of Rome’s phallic grandeur in its all-white glory is in progress.
Steven Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Donald Trump, spits his contempt at “Democrats on the left” who have “scarred the landscape of our country with grotesque so-called modern art that celebrates ugliness,” drawing a not-so-subtle analogy with progressive policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion he loathes equally.
An August 2025 Executive Order dictated that future federal buildings in Washington, D.C. be designed in the “classical style,” defined as “the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity.” Classical architecture, the EO states, visually connects “our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy” as was the intent of the country’s founders.
Ironically, this claim, if stripped of its contemporary politics, would likely have found a supporter in Thomas Jefferson, who, channeling the work of sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio, adapted the temples of antiquity to serve as citadels of democracy. Although this required some modest square footage and frontage inflation to accommodate adequate representative bodies and the support staff required to manage even embryonic bureaucracies, the proportions were maintained. Typically, this manifested as a central structure, fronted by a portico supported by a row of monumental columns, flanked by symmetrical structures to the left and right, and often accompanied by colonnades leading to low offices or other support facilities, which were distanced somewhat from the main building.
“True Palladianism” at the Villa Godi (1537–1542) – from Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura. The flanking pavilions are agricultural buildings, not part of the villa. In the 18th century, the connecting colonnades evolved as enfilades of rooms, while the pavilions often became self-contained wings or blocks – a common feature of 18th-century Palladianism. Wikipedia
This was the model for the White House until mid-October 2025, a main central structure in the 5-part Palladian style, flanked by colonnades leading to the West Wing and the East Wing. It does not seem as if respect for tradition was on the mind of Trump or Miller. Instead, the wrecking ball, swung with all the subtlety of a giant truck nut, erased a symbol that balanced power with humility in anticipation of a palace erection that would make Caligula cringe.
Investigations show that people of low mentality are increasing. This is a most alarming situation. One of the causes of the downfall of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome is believed to have been the increase of degeneracy of the people of those nations. Does the rising tide of crime and immorality in this country suggest that we may be headed toward decline? Will the American civilization, in centuries to come, go the way of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations? It need not if we are willing to give attention and thought to producing better generations of human beings
Elwood D. Heiss and Richard H. Lape., Biology: A Basic Science, 1959
Indeed, the rising tide of crime and immorality does suggest this country may be headed toward decline. But this criminality and immorality is not in our genes. It is in the White House.