On the Obama Presidential Center, the Trump glass tower, and the magnificent American tradition of gilding the public with someone else's ego.

There is a window-starved building rising on the South Side of Chicago that looks, to any honest eye, as though a Crusader fortress mated drunkenly with a parking garage and produced this gray, hulking, joyless monolith — so aggressively ugly that one suspects the architect was settling a personal grudge. 

This is the Obama Presidential Center, which cost $850 million, a figure so grotesque it should be carved above the entrance as a warning, the way Dante inscribed Abandon hope above the gates of Hell.