Trump's Rose Garden revamp makes the ugliness of our era plain

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The Shame of the Rose

It hasn’t yet reached the notoriety and acclaim of a “Notes on Camp,” but few essays have captured the vibe of the last decade better than RS Benedict’s “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.”

Published in 2021 by the online sci-fi/horror magazine Blood Knife, the piece takes an unflinching look at the perfect on-screen bodies of the superhero era. Benedict dives into the normalization of comedic actors putting on 30 pounds of muscle to convincingly wear spandex and crack jokes at alien hordes. These movies fetishize bodies not as sex objects, but as ruthlessly efficient machines. Imagine the shower scenes in Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” with an extra layer of deadly seriousness, and you’re most of the way there.

A parallel aesthetic has developed in the worlds of architecture and interior design. As the richest people in the world have gone from oil barons and communications scions to app makers and data center owners, the trappings of wealth have shifted. Separated from the status plays and classical educations of the Northeastern blue-bloods, the wealthy have crafted a design language with all the warmth of an iPhone screen. White marble, grey floors, cold recessed lighting and open floor plans, call it “everything is expensive and nothing is beautiful.”

Donald Trump’s redesigned Rose Garden is of a piece with the charmless movement. Photos of the redesign appeared over the weekend, and it’s fair to ask if the space can be called a “garden” at all. Gone are the carefully tended beds of flowers and the long expanse of lawn. In its place, Trump has put an uninterrupted slab of stone, one giant patio. The redesign prioritizes maintenance costs and a false sense of cleanliness over anything remotely pleasurable.

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a medieval abbey’s library that houses the lost second book of Aristotle’s “Poetics” burns to the ground. How we get to that point is complicated, both because the book is a murder mystery and because its author was one of the foremost thinkers in the field of semiotics. What’s important for our purposes is the motive of the accidental arsonist and intentional murderer. Jorge of Burgos is willing to kill to keep things neat, viewing laughter as an affront to God.

Peering into the grey stone that used to be a garden, it’s clear that America’s fascist moment isn’t going to come with the small comfort of absolutely b**chin’ Futurist art. Sheparded in by the same people who are trying to eliminate artistry in favor of robot hallucinations, our neo-fascist era is bound to be defined by slop created by computers striving to output the median example of everything.

Like the new Rose Garden, there’s no spark and no consideration for humanity. The AI art generator doesn’t know or care about how humans interact with art. Trump’s stone garden doesn’t consider how spaces will be used and enjoyed in practice. Like corporate superhero movies, it’s an antiseptic, “look, don’t touch” aesthetic. The redesign imports the comically bad taste of the era’s billionaires on the White House grounds and dares you to laugh.

What do you think? Are we well on our way to the first unfashionable fascist era? Will we be able to fix all the crude moves that Trump and his cronies make the U.S. less beautiful? Sound off in the comments.

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