A farewell to the Trump aesthetic
10 minutes to read
By: Vanessa Friedman
Four years of hard-core branding, soap opera chic and designer trolling are coming to an end. What have we learned? A look back in gilt.
Few presidents have exploited the theatrical grandeur of the job
quite as enthusiastically or as cynically as Donald Trump, from his proliferating forests of flags to his gilding of the Oval Office. Few have been as strategic about the power of caricature or had such a complicit wife and court to bolster the spectacle. As a group, they tapped into the dregs of Dynasty and The Bonfire of the Vanities past that sits nestled in our lizard brains. For four years, we parsed soap opera chic instead of The West Wing. The visuals demanded attention, just like the tweets.