The leftists think trump is a dictator. The right thinks trump is an irresponsibly spending warmonger. And everyone thinks the entire damn government is rife with all sorts of bad things.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.
Well, to encapsulate your point here - you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government so of course any attempt by the government to legitimize itself you’d find disagreeable. Is that right?
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.
Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.