Take a leaf out of Trump’s book, at least on public websites

Donald Trump is the president who doesn’t speak, but mumbles. He gets bogged down in the same concepts and eventually ventures into rambling digressions destined never to end. From a purely graphic design perspective, however, the White House has something to teach everyone, Italians in particular. Trump’s grotesque content is, in fact, housed on institutional websites that are anything but confusing. They are designed by the National Design Studio (NDS), the digital offshoot of Elon Musk’s Doge, established on 21 August 2025 by a presidential executive order. The (three-year) mandate was clear: “To transform the vast expanse of obsolete government websites into a service of excellence”, as stated on the studio’s website. The studio comprises a small group of designers and engineers from multinationals such as Apple, Nike, Google, Meta and the online booking giant Airbnb, whose co-founder Joe Gebbia was chosen by Trump as chief state designer to steer the whole operation towards digital clarity.

Unlike the prominent blue buttons on the Revenue Agency’s portal, the site features large, assertive headlines, generous spacing, and animated and interactive elements. With an aesthetic more reminiscent of a shoe e-commerce site than a public website, in just over a year the Nds has given every Trumpian rant a chic and fluid look. There is realfood.gov, built around the new nutritional guidelines promoted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the slogan “Real Food Wins”, complete with an upside-down food pyramid and a Mike Tyson advertisement on a loop. Trump also uses his websites for recruitment: “Join the agency of your dreams”, reads the headline in huge letters on the website of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, a multi-agency federal body established in March 2025. Another portal, that of the task force against transnational criminal organisations, opens with the slogan “We don’t negotiate. We dismantle’. It then displays the results with large counters and a constantly updating timeline showing arrests and convictions resulting from their operations. Among the initiatives of which Trump is most proud, however, is trumpaccounts.gov, a website entirely gold in colour and filled with coins, dedicated to tax-advantaged investment accounts for American children.

Another face of the NDS, Edward “Big Balls” Coristine (born 2005), has been very active in recent weeks in presenting the latest – and perhaps definitive – White House website. With a straightforward name, America.gov is a chatbot that queries nearly 30,000 government websites to provide Americans with a single point of administrative access. To function, this massive digital portal relies on AI models (pardon me, SI, as Trump has ordered us to call ‘superintelligence’) such as Grok and Gemini. A digital portal of this kind might make it somewhat easier to register for SPID, pay taxes, or access one’s tax records without becoming bogged down in the frustrating tangle of interminably long forms, annoying pop-ups, constant requests for consent, and “under maintenance” pages that typify our own public portals—which have been brilliantly satirised by the parody site “Portale Unico delle Complicazioni Semplici” (Single Portal for Simple Complications).

So far, however, even America.gov has a bit of an Italian flavour. Users have in fact encountered problems carrying out the promised administrative procedures (passport renewal, voter registration, etc.), and the bot often contradicts Trump’s identity-based rhetoric. If asked who won the 2020 election, the bot replies without hesitation: “Joe Biden”. Go and explain that to the boss.