David BolesThe Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
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