ABSTRACT
On June 16th, 2015 Donald Trump descends the escalator of his branded, semiotically dualistic representation of opulent corporate modernity as one of the United States' most prosperous businessmen. In the first building to carry his name he announces himself as soon to be ‘the Greatest President God ever made’, at least with respect to job creation. In the coming months Trump Tower would be the base for his election campaign, the setting for a Jackie Kennedy-like ‘tour of the Whitehouse’ by Melania Trump, a locale for a political rendezvous with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the headquarters of the Trump administration Transition Team. For a brief period in 2016 Trump Tower was purposed as a proxy form of American political architecture presented on a populist anti-establishment platform and filtered through a mediated prism capable of totally distorting its previous reified social, cultural and political associations. To recognise how such 66a transmogrification was conceivable, albeit momentary, it is expedient to revisit the conditions of the building's conception as the cultural seepage of the Neoliberal economic turn in the United States that, in the very specific context of New York, simultaneously turned the city into the centre of global finance and a role model for the post-modern cultural consumerist regeneration for urban centres across the Western world from the 1970s onwards. It was a city which, by the time Trump Tower broke ground in 1979, was already in possession of its own ‘ready-made’ architectural symbol of the new political-economy, The World Trade Center (WTC) – an exposition of which clarifies much of the political and economic context necessary to consider the role of Trump Tower in 2016.
