Credit: Charlie Powell
For thirty-one years,the building located at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., housed the National Endowment for the Humanities—until 2014, after the building was acquired by Donald Trump. It opened as the Trump International Hotel in 2016.
The President’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2018 would eliminate funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities entirely, as well as to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It would also slash funds to the National Park Service and undercut a great deal of the incentive for investors to rehabilitate buildings of historic value through tax credits Trump himself has received on his Washington hotel.
Trump’s attitude toward all of these programs is illuminated by his actions regarding his hotel in downtown Washington’s Federal Triangle. Rather than maintain the character and irreplaceable qualities of the one-time post office—a neo-Romanesque building which holds a spot on the National Register of Historic Places—Trump made it ostentatious.
When Trump was seeking to lease the building in 2012, he promised great things, hiring Arthur Cotton Moore, a renowned architect whose history with the building went back several decades, to oversee the restoration. Moore had been instrumental in defending it from the wrecking ball in the 1960s and 1970s, and his presence on the project reassured others that Trump’s ambitions might not be what they feared.
But once Trump had won the competition to acquire the building, Moore took an indefinite leave of absence, reportedly for medical reasons that were never specified. One could not help but ask: Was the man who had “unimpeachable” historic preservation credentials used as a mere bargaining chip by someone who prides himself on being the king of negotiating?
Soon, those working on Trump’s behalf (mainly under the direction of his daughter Ivanka) began doing things that one member of the Trump team described as “inappropriate” and “inconsistent with the fabric of the building,” according to a BuzzFeed report. Trump opined that the white marble floors that had existed since the building’s opening in 1899 were “too old.” He wanted to rip them up and replace them with carpeting, but instead settled for putting carpet on top of the floors—surely the better option, but still akin to slapping house paint on a classic car.
Trump opined that the white marble floors that had existed since the building’s opening in 1899 were “too old,” and wanted to rip them up and replace them with carpet.
Furthermore, to fulfill the billionaire’s desire that the hotel be “incredible, super luxury,” Moore’s replacement submitted pages of future depictions of the lobby, all labeled “Interior Paint and Gold Leafing.” After all, “[Trump] wants to use gold on everything,” observed a former member of his team.
Understandably, this did not go over well. Trump “does not deserve this building,” lamented architect John Cullinane, who resigned as preservation architect because developers were “covering up or tearing out everything that was historic.”
Preservation experts decried Trump’s plans for blatantly violating historic preservation standards. According to the minutes from a 2013 meeting, everyone “agreed that there was no precedent for the building for any gold leaf and it should not be used.” But these experts were steamrolled by Trump, whose mindset required that actions came first, and explanations later.
This is all part of a lifelong pattern for Donald Trump, one that provides insight into his willingness to shutter government agencies devoted to aesthetics, whether natural or man-made. The President appears dead-set on wrecking all things beautiful—the things that make America great—with neither the hindsight nor the foreknowledge to recognize the danger in doing so.
In March 2016, an article in The New York Times offered a glimpse into Trump’s life at what is now the “southern White House”—the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It drew on the perspective of Trump’s longtime personal butler, Anthony Senecal. Having worked for Trump for nearly three decades, Senecal was able to provide insight into the President’s indifference to historic and cultural values.
Built in the Roaring Twenties under the direction of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, Mar-a-Lago was purchased and subsequently renovated by Trump in the 1980s. Early on during the Trump family’s periodic stays there, Ivanka slept in a room with nursery rhyme-themed tiles that Trump liked to tell guests were made by Walt Disney. According to the Times, Trump would say, “You don’t like that, do you?” when he caught Senecal rolling his eyes. Senecal would respond that this claim about Walt Disney was not true. Trump’s response, delivered with a laugh: “Who cares?”
Post had adorned the estate with Italian stone and sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries. But Trump didn’t seem too impressed; the tapestries faded as a result of his refusal to protect them from harsh sunlight. Senecal also recalled how the home’s library held rare first-edition books that were never read. The library eventually turned into a bar (an odd development since the President doesn’t drink) and in place of bookshelves, Trump hung a portrait of himself in tennis whites, with the sun’s golden rays illuminating his hair and skin.
Mar-a-Lago, like Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., holds a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Created by the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, the register is administered by the National Park Service and seeks to identify and fundraise for the restoration of sites of historic, cultural, and aesthetic value.
The Federal Historic Tax Credit, administered through the National Park Service, encourages potential property owners like Trump to invest in historic buildings. The tax credit program actually generates more money than it costs. Since 1981, it has drawn $120 billion in private investment and created 2.3 million jobs, 75 percent of which stay local. But it is among the programs currently threatened by Trump.
The National Park Service now faces a $1.5 billion budget cut via the Department of the Interior. Although the President donated his first quarter salary (nearly $80,000) to the Park Service for the preservation of historic battlefields, this was primarily a public relations stunt. It does comically little to address the $12 billion in deferred maintenance for the Park Service, which includes $229 million for battlefield sites alone.
Some 4,000 miles from balmy Mar-a-Lago, in northeastern Scotland, Trump promised to build “the world’s greatest” golf course. Instead, his development of the project in Balmedie turned into a war with adjacent property owners capped off with aesthetic denigration.
“Before the golf course came here, this was a pristine natural landscape, wild and untamed,” remarked neighbor David Milne. “It was rough land, nature at its finest. Now, it’s just a golf course.”
Milne and other neighbors have been pressured by Trump and his lawyers to sell their homes. These include neighbors Michael Forbes (who Trump said lived “like a pig”) and John and Susan Munro. The Munros get up every morning and face a nearly fifteen-foot-high earthen wall on two sides of their property constructed by Trump’s people. The couple no longer have a view of the Scottish coastline, an environmentally protected site with sand dunes predating the reign of King Tut.
Years ago, Trump proclaimed that the site was “perfect” for development. Once it was developed, he boasted, “What I’ve done is made the land incredible.” But reports by scientific organizations have listed myriad concerns regarding wildlife and animals’ habitats on and around the course, with one example being the effect of pesticides on fish that swim in nearby waters.
This is unfortunate because when Trump first requested permission to build the golf course in 2008, the Aberdeenshire Council refused due to environmental concerns. “Scotland’s equivalent of the Amazonian rain forest,” was how Martin Ford, then chairman of the local planning committee, described the land in question.
Ultimately, this argument did not prevail, as the “national economic interest” was deemed more vital. Several years later, however, a former first minister of Scotland asserted that Balmedie “got ten cents on the dollar.” Not only that: Trump has recently dissolved the advisory group charged with examining the environmental effect of what was marketed as the greatest golf course in the world.
In 1965, while Trump was attending Fordham University and smacking golf balls into rivers, Congress passed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. This put full weight behind the idea that it is necessary and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry.
Taken together, the budgets for the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities account for just over .002 percent of federal discretionary spending. Yet by awarding grants to museums, archives, libraries, schools, public television, and scholars, the government wisely invests in the culture that enlivens it. Countless individuals benefit either directly or indirectly from what the endowments provide.
The National Endowment for the Arts also helps provide material conditions necessary for intellectual inquiry. Without it, many would simply not have the opportunity to “play an instrument, test-drive their God-given creativity, and develop a passion for those things that civilize and humanize us all,” as former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee wrote in his “conservative plea” for the NEA.
In October 2016, for instance, the NEA partnered with the Department of Defense to expand arts therapies for service members and veterans. The initiative, Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network, helps those with PTSD and other injuries sustained in combat improve their quality of life through visual arts and music activities.
“Previously, I had been unwilling or unable to explain how tortured I felt,” explained one service member of the experience. “Art therapy provided the outlet which directly impacted one of the most important course changes of my life.”
Trump’s call to defund the NEA would undermine this and other programs.
Much of the money that supports the arts does not come from government. In 2015, for instance, the Smithsonian raised nearly $230 million in nongovernment funding. In that same year, GivingUSA calculates, donations from individuals, foundations, estates, and corporations to “Arts/Culture/Humanities” recipients surpassed a remarkable $17 billion.
In the second grade, Trump wrote, “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”
But philanthropy needs a partner to succeed. Cooperation between the public and private sectors is essential. Trump’s short-sighted belief, expressed in his budget, is that government has no compelling interest in looking after the culture and history of its own people. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given his own relationship to the arts, maybe best summed up by an anecdote he shared in his book The Art of the Deal.
In the second grade, Trump wrote, “I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”
A 2011 photo shoot in the Trump Tower penthouse in New York City captured the future President sitting in a Louis XV chair, an exquisite eighteenth-century French antique in the Rococo style, marked by abbreviated armrests, curved legs, and an abundance of ornate, gold designs.
This piece of furniture can be dated to France’s high period of art and culture in the Enlightenment. The irony here is too rich to miss, as we have seen why the “ratings machine, DJT,” as Trump has called himself, would only be attracted to its vanity rather than its historical and cultural merit. He prides himself on his brand, his bold image, and his possessions.
To the billionaire real-estate tycoon, the gold on that chair means “winning,” having “success,” and being “great.” In his hamfisted, zero-sum pursuit of this axis of idolatry, Trump has failed to see what others can: that there is a different type of greatness. All that glitters is not gold. The defining qualities of the arts and humanities—nuance, humbleness, reflection, and appreciation—are consistently at odds with how Trump conducts himself.
If Trump is to acquire a “better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future,” as the 1965 Arts and Humanities Act prescribed, he needs a historical anchor. David McCullough, who wrote the presidential biographies Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001), calls history an “aid to navigation” and an “antidote to a lot of unfortunate human trends like self-importance.”
Lacking this historical and cultural understanding is debilitating for any President. But it is even worse to restrict endeavors that would enable him, and everyone else, to develop that understanding.
William Vaillancourt is a writer and editor from New Hampshire.