In The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński’s classic portrait of autocratic senility, Emperor Haile Selassie orders a great palace to be built in Ethiopia’s Ogaden Desert, keeps a liveried staff there for many years—but visits the site only a single day. In Addis Ababa, one servant waits on Emperor Selassie so that whenever he mounts his throne he can place a pillow under the Emperor’s feet (Selassie was very short), and another stands by so that when the Emperor’s little dog pisses on a visiting dignitary’s shoe this servant can wipe it off with a satin cloth. The dignitaries are not permitted so much as to flinch.

The point, I guess, is that autumnal patriarchs run out of large abuses of power to initiate (indiscriminate deportations, selling pardons) and turn to petty ones. Two examples of the latter are Trump’s gilding the Oval Office and erecting a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom that dwarfs the executive mansion. The style of these is literally rococo because MAGA itself has entered its rococo stage. The latest example is Trump’s war on sans serif fonts—that is, typeface lacking traditional small decorative flourishes.

It started with words. When Trump returned to office he banned from all government communications the words and phrases equality, inequality, climate science, at-risk, socioeconomic, underprivileged, and 193 others. Now Trump is dictating how the letters in the remaining words should appear on a computer screen or page. It’s reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio on December 9 sent an “action request” to all diplomatic posts ordering them to stop using sans serif type to “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”

If you’re wondering how Rubio could possibly have time for such small matters while Israel makes a sham of its Gaza ceasefire and Trump sells out Ukraine, the answer is that this comes from the top. A source tells me that a Trump administration official outside the State Department recently delivered a similar harangue about sans serif, baffling everyone at the meeting in question. As far back as inauguration day, the Trump White House replaced the Decimal sans serif headline font on the Biden White House webpage with the serif-rich Instrument Serif. “I don’t love that the White House uses it,” Instrument Serif’s inventor, Jordan Egstad, recently told Jezebel’s Daniel Han. “Fuck Donald Trump.”

Last month, Trump ordered placed, on a pillar just outside his office and behind the (former) Rose Garden, some gold signage (“The Oval Office”) in flourish-heavy Shelley Script. It looked like an invitation to a Bar Mitzvah. That came down, then went up again. The same font is also visible along the “Presidential Walk of Fame” (the same one where President Joe Biden is depicted, insultingly, as an autopen). It’s all part of Trump’s project to make the White House resemble a 1970s dinner theater.

Before proceeding, let me declare myself. I harbor a mild preference for serifs. The font you see in this article and throughout The New Republic’s website (also its monthly print magazine) has serifs. I like serifs, but I don’t make a big thing of it because, unlike the president of the United States, I have better things to do with my time.

Sans Serif fonts gained popularity in the early 20th century with the rise of mass advertising because sans serif was judged easier to read from a distance. Modernist graphic artists liked sans serif’s stripped-down aesthetic, and in the early days of the World Wide Web graphic designers decided sans serif was easier to read on a screen. (A sans serif font was the default typeface for Windows Office from 2006 to 2023.) Today, sans serif remains pretty rare in dead-tree books, but online you’re as likely to encounter serifs as not. Older readers typically prefer serifs, whereas millennials, according to New York magazine, can’t abide them. To which I say: Fine, sure, whatever.

The Trump administration opposes sans serif because they think it’s DEI bullshit. In 2023, Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken, in a cable headlined “The Times (New Roman) They Are A Changin’,” switched State department communications to the sans serif Calibri font. His reason was that it was easier to read for people with dyslexia or other reading disabilities—and, yes, that suggestion came from the State department’s office of diversity and inclusion, one of many such offices throughout the federal government that Trump ordered eliminated his first day in office.

Rubio’s December 9 cable (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman’s 14-Point Font Required For All Department Paper”) argued that “Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.” Oh, please. The only degradation here is Rubio’s own in pandering to Trump’s pettiest prejudices. Times New Roman, Rubio wrote in his memo, “aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive.” That executive order was Trump’s warning to the diplomatic corps that if you don’t play ball, he’ll fire your ass. I guess Rubio’s point in citing it was that if you continue to use Calibri, he’ll fire your ass.

The irony, of course, is that when it comes to reading, Trump could use all the DEI assistance he can get. That’s been evident for some time; see, for instance, this hilarious 1987 clip where Trump says first that he hasn’t read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says he “really liked Tom Wolfe’s last book,” which was The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says Wolfe’s “done a beautiful job” with “his current book”; then confirms that he means The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says “I really can’t hear with this earphone by the way.” In 2016 Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” In 2016, Megyn Kelly asked Trump to name the most recent book he’d read. Trump’s reply: “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time.” People have speculated for years that Trump is dyslexic. The big headlines on his White House website now have serifs, but much of the text does not. Has Trump even noticed?

In initiating a crusade against sans serif type, Trump appears to be telling us: “I’ve never read my briefing books and I don’t intend to start now. But I like how things look, and serifs look better, and if that creates problems for handicapped people I don’t care.”

A comparison here with Ethiopia’s late Emperor is instructive. Selassie “had no schooling,” Kapuściński reports (not an excuse Trump can make). For Selassie, “The custom of relating things by word of mouth” had certain advantages:

If need be, the emperor could say that a given dignitary had told him something quite different from what had really been said, and the latter could not defend himself, having no written proof. Thus the Emperor heard from his subordinates not what they told him, but what he thought should be said.

But petty tyrant though he was, even Selassie didn’t likely give a damn whether the reading matter he didn’t read had serifs or not. Once again, Trump is breaking new ground.