Chatting with some members before a recent round of golf, he explained his frequent appearances: “That White House is a real dump.” Trump is often at his most unguarded among the people who pay for their proximity to him.

Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallels—not with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style.

A decade ago, I published a book on exactly that topic: Fascinated by the question of what makes dictators’ houses so recognizably similar, I spent months poring over pictures—from across the continents, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st—and trying to pick out the features they had in common and what those features said about their occupants. I ended up with 16 case studies—strongmen from Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz to Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic—and most of them, I concluded, obeyed 10 defining “dictator chic” rules.