At the end of August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that federal buildings be constructed in the neoclassical architectural style, just as he did during his first term. And as before, Trump’s dictate is a colossal distraction from the real havoc his administration is wreaking on cities and the built environment.

Aside from the $200 million White House ballroom currently under construction, Trump’s order seems designed more to appeal to his base than to kick-start any real effort to build faux-Roman temples. Trump’s real impact on architecture will be made through the sales of federal buildings, the spatial occupation of American cities by military patrols, the denial of disaster recovery funds to places like tornado-stricken St Louis, and the construction of immigration detention camps that gin up profits for the private sector.

Liberals, progressives, and even some socialists seem to be falling for the distraction, expending time and energy on what is undoubtedly a well-crafted diatribe. Clearly Trump’s ghostwriters understand the symbolic use of neoclassical architecture as an instrument of social control, especially the implications of the style’s racialized past. From the Roman rotunda of the St Louis Hotel in New Orleans, where slave auctions took place in the early nineteenth century, to the US Capitol Building itself, built by slave labor, neoclassical architecture in the United States has long represented rule by white elites and the dehumanization of everyone else. Neoclassicism thus represents the betrayal of our nation’s founding ideals of liberty and democracy, not their fulfillment.