America is having a Frank Capra moment. Not one of those uplifting finales but the scene in It’s A Wonderful Life where George Bailey (builder of affordable housing, savings and loan owner of unimpeachable generosity and ethics, honorer of veterans, monogamy incarnate!) hallucinates (on a trip induced by Clarence, his guardian angel) what might have happened to his beloved Bedford Falls had he never been born and the evil Henry Potter supplanted him as the town’s leading citizen and spirit. It’s a picture of unmitigated darkness, filled with “cocktail bars, casinos, and gentleman’s clubs,” rife with poverty, crime, misery.

Sound familiar? This could be Trump’s America, evoked in his doom-laden convention speech depicting our prospective future, and in the version of the country he has spent so many decades constructing in reality: those cocktail bars, casinos, and clubs. With the help of many of our leading practitioners—from Philip Johnson to Der Scutt to Adrian Smith—Trump has done more building than any politician since Jefferson (even if Trump University is a little more virtual and a little less rigorous than the University of Virginia, and Mar-a-Lago a skosh glitzier than Monticello!).