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In the flurry of executive orders that Donald Trump signed on day one of his return as President of the United States was one which promotes the use of traditional and classical architecture in new civic buildings.

Titled Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture and signed on 20 January, right after Trump took his oath, the executive order gives head of US government departments 90 days to submit recommendations for uplifting and beautifying public spaces and ennobling the country.

Presidents of the United States have the power to issue executive orders, directives which do not require congressional approval. These mandates are legally binding, although they can be revoked by the court system or by successors in the Oval Office.

This new measure is the resumption of a policy introduced during Trump’s first term, on 21 December 2020, also titled Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture. That original order prescribed classical architecture in federal buildings, but was repealed by President Joe Biden in February 2021, 69 days after its signing.

This latest dictate, signed by Trump on day one of his second administration, just goes to show the continued importance he gives to the matter of architectural styles used in civic buildings. Early on in his first presidency he issued a draft order named ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,’ which along with encouraging classical architecture aimed to ban public buildings from taking on brutalist or deconstructivist styles, as Luis Fernández-Galiano explained in his article State Styles, published in Arquitectura Viva 222 (2020).