Trump's Ballroom and Arch? Hitler laughs.

Donald Trump, our Outlaw Prez, loves him some dictators. He envies the power exerted by Vlad Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Kim Jong Un, Victor Orbán, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Rodrigo Duterte, Mohammed bin Salman and Nayib Bukele. He's had good things to say about all of them. He wants to be them.

Like many dictators, Trump loves grandiose, historically inauthentic, and overly theatrical architecture. He favors monumentality over subtlety, heavy ornamentation, polished stone and gold finishes, oversized ceremonial spaces, and structures intended to project permanence, wealth, and power, such as the lavish official architecture of some Gulf monarchies, or the opulent presidential palaces built by leaders like Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu or Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov. He definitely likes big, as shown by the plans for his gigantic triumphal arch and the White House ballroom atrocity that makes "gaudy" seem complimentary.

However, despite Trump's swaggering (but comical) pomposity, the structures with which he wants to scar Washington are piddling compared to the dreams of the Nazi dictator whose speeches were collected in a book — My New Order — that Trump's late wife Ivana said he kept in a cabinet at his bedside.

For instance, Trump's proposed arch in D.C. would be 260 feet tall, twice the height of the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, 63 feet taller than the largest still-standing triumphal arch in Pyongyang, North Korea, and 99 feet taller than Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe in Paris. However, Trump's proposed arch is a pitiful wannabe compared with the proposed 384 feet of the arch Der Führer wanted Albert Speer to build in "Welthauptstadt Germania," the name chosen for postwar Berlin.

As for the ballroom, Trump says it will be able to hold 999 people. But Speer's Volkshalle — Great Hall — with a dome larger than St. Peter's basilica in Rome, was planned to be 951 feet tall and hold 180,000 people. Hitler would have laughed over The Donald's tiny ballroom. But his Germania fantasy was obviously never built. The orange menace does not share Speer's stripped-down, austere neoclassicism of proposed buildings that relied on enormous masses of plain stone and severe geometry. Trump's grotesquely ostentatious gilded taste contrasts sharply with Speer's stark style.

Fortunately, for so many reasons, Germania never came to be. The triumphal arch and the Volkshalle were never built. If only the same could be made to happen to Trump's fantasies of smashing democracy and planting architectural monuments like gravestones atop the wreckage.

After the fire of 64 CE burned two-thirds of Rome 1,962 years ago this month, Emperor Nero built the Domus Aurea, something Trump might have chosen if he spoke Latin, the meaning being "Golden House." The palace and grounds covered an area of at least the size of 100 U.S football fields. Historian Suetonius wrote that "The vestibule was large enough to contain a colossal statue of the emperor 120 feet high ... There were dining rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers, and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. ... The ceilings were overlaid with gold. [...] There was a pond too, like a sea, surrounded with buildings to represent cities, besides tracts of country, varied by tilled fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods …"

But in 68, with much going wrong at home and elsewhere in the empire, his popularity in the toilet among plebeians and patricians alike, and the Praetorian Guard having abandoned him, Nero fled. After his death by assisted suicide, successive emperors literally buried his palace and erected new buildings atop it in one of the most remarkable acts of political symbolism in Roman history. A private imperial lake became a public amphitheater capable of seating roughly 50,000 spectators, transforming one of antiquity's most notorious examples of personal extravagance into one of Rome's greatest public monuments. Come January 21, 2029, a new Congress should cue the bulldozers on Trump's Neroic, Hitlerian monstrosities.