Nobody ever accused President Trump of having a refined aesthetic sensibility, but he knows what he likes, and it’s clear what it means. This became apparent again when the White House announced that he intends to build a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the East Wing of the White House now stands.

The project, designed by the traditionalist architect James McCrery II, will be built in the style of Gilded Age neoclassicism, complete with arched windows, chandeliers and Corinthian columns. “Its theme and architectural heritage will be almost identical” to the existing building, said the White House in a statement. (Many architectural preservationists have already expressed their concerns about the ballroom addition.)

Of course, it looks to be closer to the spirit of Mar-a-Lago or perhaps the Willard Hotel, but it matches what Mr. Trump has already begun doing to the White House, glamming up the Oval Office and paving the Rose Garden. And it coheres with his 2020 “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which attempted to put an end to modernism in government buildings. This order drew applause from many on the right, who see a return to Western heritage styles of architecture, and a rejection of brutalism and other modern styles they associate with political systems they reject, including socialism, as a way to return us to more traditional values.

Mr. Trump is right to try to reclaim meaning in American architecture, to identify some kind of coherent national identity. It’s hard to argue that modernist architecture, with its rigid aesthetic, lack of clear meaning, and disconnect from the human scale has been up to the task, even as the left tends to prefers it. Take the example of the abstract lump that is the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. It’s hard to know what it is supposed to look like, much less what it means. That seems telling.

How then, might we forge a consensus?

The meaning of any style is mutable and imprecise, especially with time. In fact, the now-beloved brutalist Yale School of Architecture was apparently lit on fire by student activists in 1969, in protest of faculty firings and an urban planning department out of touch with local communities.

Casa del Fascio, a literal fascist lair in Como, Italy, was designed by the legendary Italian modernist Giuseppe Terragni. The Nazis liked neo-classicism, but so did the architects of the Carnegie libraries.