The ornate Hall of Horticulture was built for Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901 — or was it?
Photographer: ullstein bild Dtl. via Getty Images
The Tartarian Candidate
How did a bizarre architectural conspiracy theory insert itself into the US political discourse — and why do so many adherents insist that Donald Trump is a believer?
At a New Hampshire GOP meeting in January, Donald Trump took off on an odd tangent. Lamenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he talked about its architectural heritage. “I mean, the country, how does it ever rebuild those cities, those magnificent buildings that came down that are a thousand years old with the gold domes? You can’t do that.”
A few weeks later in Georgia, Trump went from talking trade policy to marveling at Washington, DC’s neoclassical buildings: “Beautiful columns built 200 years ago and 100 years ago, gorgeous columns. You say, how did they ever build them? How did they move them? They didn’t have the equipment to move them. They moved them through force of will.”