Trump and the executive order to restore beauty

For some years now, we have been caught up in the mental gymnastics of trying to understand the relationship between Marxism and postmodernism.

At one level though, it’s extremely simple. Postmodern art is dialectical art.

In other words, it is art that is launched on the public as a weapon to destroy art itself. To deracinate our sense of aesthetic beauty. To show contempt where respect and appreciation was the norm. It is anti-art, art. Like all dialectic attacks on Western Civilization. Take an attribute of classical thought and its expressions, and destroy it with an intersectional line of attack.

Below is Stephen Coughlin’s graph, which I think was taken from a feminist-Marxist think tank showing how they destroy western paradigms with dialectical lines of attack:

(For a complete explanation of that graph, please see this brief by Maj. Stephen Coughlin)

But if I were to make one, I would have spokes that showed how mass line narratives such as:

“Diversity is our strength” was the intersectional line of attack against the well understood and axiomatic, “United we stand, divided we fall”.

“The Religion of Peace” is the intersectional attack on “kill the unbeliever wherever you find him”. etc. etc.ad nauseam.

In the book Explaining Postmodernism (Available as a free audiobook on YouTube) by Steven Hicks, or Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray, Post modernism is explained very well. And in both books it is clear that the purpose of postmodern art is to destroy art.

So it was with a sense of tremendous joy that I became aware of one of President Trump’s lesser known executive orders, and from back in August:

MAKING FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose.  The Founders, in line with great societies before them, attached great importance to Federal civic architecture.  They wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue.  President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.  They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.

Washington and Jefferson personally oversaw the competitions to design the Capitol Building and the White House.  Under the direction and following the vision of these two Founders, Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed the Nation’s capital as a classical city.  For approximately a century and a half following America’s founding, America’s Federal architecture continued to be characterized by beautiful and beloved buildings of largely, though not exclusively, classical design.  In the 1960s, the Federal Government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modernist and brutalist ones.  The Federal architecture that ensued, overseen by the General Services Administration (GSA), was often unpopular with Americans.  The new buildings ranged from the undistinguished to designs even GSA now admits many in the public found unappealing.  

Please read the rest at Whitehouse,gov.

Reading the order shows that the Trump administration has a very clear grasp of exactly what it is doing, and what it is fighting. This is inspiring stuff. A few more paragraphs:

(b)  “Brutalist architecture” means the style of architecture that grew out of the early 20th-century modernist movement that is characterized by a massive and block-like appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of exposed poured concrete.

(c)  “Classical architecture” means the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio; such Enlightenment masters as Robert Adam, John Soane, and Christopher Wren; such 19th-century architects as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter; and such 20th-century practitioners as Julian Abele, Daniel Burnham, Rafael Carmoega, Charles F. McKim, John Russell Pope, Julia Morgan, and the firm of Delano and Aldrich.  Classical architecture encompasses such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.

(d)  “Deconstructivist architecture” means the style of architecture generally known as “deconstructivism” that emerged during the late 1980s and that features fragmentation, disorder, discontinuity, distortion, skewed geometry, and the appearance of instability.

Understanding that this is not trivial, nor is it a restriction on freedom of expression is critical to the survival of the republic. At a certain point, the symbols we represent an idea with, is what shapes the opinion in the minds of the people exposed to the idea. This is a large part of the leftist plan. To destroy symbols in order to destroy the ideas themselves. But also to replace the symbols with ones which give the same emotional palette to communist ideas. Just look at early Soviet art to get the picture. Nazi art as well. The dignity and beauty it stole from civilization, as well as destroyed by misrepresentation, it granted to itself.

Source: https://vladtepesblog.com/2025/09/28/trump-and-the-executive-order-to-restore-beauty/