Last week, Donald Trump’s White House anticipated the impending government shutdown like an album release, placing a massive countdown clock at the top of WhiteHouse.gov. “Democrat Shutdown Is Imminent,” read the online home of the People’s House, on a black background. Now that the shutdown has happened, a clock is counting upward: “Democrats Have Shut Down the Government,” it says, with numbers climbing to mark the seconds, minutes, hours, and days that have elapsed.This is an unusual use of the White House website. Though WhiteHouse.gov has always been a place to showcase the administration’s agenda, it has mostly looked like the website of a mid-size high school. During the Clinton administration, it had the goofy GeoCities look of the day (American-flag GIFs); by the start of George W. Bush’s presidency, it had transitioned into a bland informational page rendered in blue, white, and gray, clotted with text. (“President Bush Participates in Signing Ceremony With NATO Secretary General De Hoop Scheffer for NATO Accession Protocols for Albania and Croatia,” for example.) It stayed that way, with minor tweaks, throughout the Obama administration, and it was as dry as ever during Trump’s first term too. Even as Trump was inciting an insurrection against the United States government, his team did not use the White House website to promote that goal. On January 6, 2021, the homepage still showed information about the new COVID-19 vaccines.But when Trump returned to office in January 2025, his transition team had a redesign ready to go. The first day, the website was transformed. Visitors saw an auto-playing trailer with an action-movie score—helicopter, jets, eagle, salute, thumbs-up, then a new White House logo in which said house was mostly black. After the video came a landing page with a photo of Trump and the message “AMERICA IS BACK” written in a new, spindly serif font on a dark navy background. Unmistakably, the design evokes the concept of “dark mode,” the default app setting for guys who take themselves very seriously and who relish the idea that they may be edgy and cool. (A friend of mine used to react to people putting their phones in dark mode by saying “Okay, Batman.”) By the way, the site is no longer available in Spanish.[Read: We’re all in “dark mode” now]Americans don’t need the White House website to explain to them the attitude of this administration—Trump’s actions and the consequences of them are plain to see. Yet the White House website is a record of an era: Looking back at the Bush years, I was struck by the plainness of the design, but also the gentle and classic expressions of patriotism that were about as jarring as an American-flag postage stamp. If WhiteHouse.gov is a chapter in the story of the second Trump administration, what is it saying?Not a design expert myself, I asked Pamela Lee, a professor of modern and contemporary art at Yale, to take a look at the site. I told her I thought the dramatic darkening of the page scanned to me as creepy and menacing, but she called this a matter of perspective. “You read it as spooky,” she said. “Some folks might come to it and think it represents something serious, somber, and masculine.” (Appropriate, maybe, for a return to power.)The same “dark mode” font treatment and color scheme have been used on the White House social-media pages since the first days of the new administration, marking another departure from the previous anodyne style. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote in March, on X, the White House is now a troll account, borrowing its snide visual language and tone from some of the internet’s most cynical spaces and deploying this style to mock and dehumanize people.These updates are apparently part of a larger project. In August, Trump announced the creation of a National Design Studio led by an Airbnb co-founder and Tesla board member, Joe Gebbia, one of the DOGE figures who was seen as a successor to Elon Musk after Musk’s departure from Washington. (One of the National Design Studio’s first projects was the website for the Trump Gold Card, a U.S. visa that will be granted only to those who can “make a gift of $1 million” to “substantially benefit” the United States.)This new team reportedly replaces a group of United States Digital Service and General Services Administration employees, many of whom resigned or were fired during the DOGE cuts earlier this year. It is tasked with modernizing the government’s digital services, but it also promises to beautify them. A launch page for the National Design Studio specifically names the Apple Store as a north star. (The White House initially responded to my request for an interview with the new team, but didn’t respond to subsequent attempts to schedule one.)A week after announcing the design studio, Trump signed an executive order titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” which states that classical styles emulating ancient Greece and Rome are the new “default” for government buildings. This sounds like a bit of a mishmash, but I can kind of see the vision. It’s familiar as one that has been popular in Silicon Valley for years, where a survey might find that the most beautiful things ever created are Apple devices and the Roman empire.This hybrid look is shared by many “network state” projects that have emerged in recent years. Those projects, which boast funding from the likes of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, promise total freedom for people who regard themselves as overly constrained by our current democracy. They tend to combine elements of sleek, modern design with images and references drawn from the distant past, when men were great, spears were shiny, and buildings were intimidating. They like the look of Roman- and Greek-sculpture busts, for instance, but photoshopped with gradient overlays and sci-fi elements. Another tech-world project called More Monuments is currently working on building a 500-foot-tall statue of George Washington in a classical style but made of stainless steel, which they are funding in part with a crypto token called GEORGE; they plan to call it The Colossus of George.Trump’s personal taste is all over the place. He leans more toward the gilded, his own interior-design preference more toward Versailles. But his chosen architect for the gigantic new White House ballroom is a member of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit whose goal is promoting classical architecture, and his selection of Gebbia, who went to the Rhode Island School of Design and cites the Bauhaus movement as inspiration, suggests that he is on board with the Apple-meets-Rome combination.When I spoke with Toby Norris, an art-history professor at Assumption University who contributed to the recent Routledge book Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, he said he didn’t think that Trump had a coherent aesthetic vision. Instead, he sees “a kind of patchwork of all these things that different people who have influence on him have been pushing.” The executive order on architecture, for instance, was reportedly “spearheaded” in 2020 by the National Civic Art Society. Trump issued a version of it at the end of his first term but it was invalidated by the Biden administration almost immediately.When Trump presents the idea of a return to the classical, it’s in a populist tone. Both the 2020 and 2025 orders argue that people dislike the Brutalist government buildings of the second half of the 20th century, and that a revival of classical architecture would be a way of giving people what they want. Critics have countered that classical architecture has taken on a more authoritarian reputation over time. It’s the architecture of ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy. “But it’s also the architecture of the Roman empire,” Norris said. The later classical architecture of Rome was on a grander scale—more imperial and assertive and over-the-top, he told me. “And then people point out that’s exactly what Hitler liked,” he added brightly.At the end of the day, the “dark mode” online aesthetic paired with the offline return to a fantasy of the awe-inspiring past is not much more than a vibe—a porridge of references to power and control. When I spoke with Lee, she noted that the right has recently been reaching into the “grab bag” of history and looking for “moments that represented either the golden ages of this or that or kind of cusp moments.” And the gloomy website I pointed to seemed, to her, to represent a darkness before a dawn, if ham-handedly.Whatever the intention, it would probably be easy enough to sell these ideas to Trump simply by calling them beautiful. “Trump uses the word beauty all the time,” Norris observed. “It’s obviously a sort of talisman for him, this word beauty.” People can disagree about what’s beautiful, of course. In her 1999 classic, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argued that spontaneous glimpses of beauty are what inspire in ordinary people the pursuit of truth and justice. I guess from another perspective, it could just mean “winning.”