Donald Trump wanted to beautify Washington DC in time for America's 250th birthday. What he actually built was a chain-link fence maze around some of the most visited landmarks on Earth, a reflecting pool that turned green, and a crane looming over the White House like a monument to his own ego. Visitors are showing up for once-in-a-lifetime trips and finding porta potties on the Ellipse and black tarpaulin covering everything else.
The Price Tag Keeps Growing and the Math Keeps Not Adding Up
Start with the East Wing. Trump ordered it demolished to make room for a ballroom, which, sure, very normal thing to do to a historic wing of the White House. He said it would cost $400 million, all paid by private donors. Recently disclosed figures reported by The Guardian show the actual projected cost is $600 million, with taxpayers covering half. So: $200 million more than promised, and the public is eating half the bill instead of none of it.
That is not a rounding error. That is a different project with a different price tag and a different funding structure than the one the president described to the American people. And it is far from the only renovation underway.
The reflecting pool on the National Mall got a $13.1 million resurfacing. Lafayette Square, the 7-acre park north of the White House famous for its revolution-era statues and fountains, is under a $17 million renovation contract. The Guardian reports that contract went to Clark Construction on a no-bid basis. Clark Construction is also the company building the White House ballroom. Funny how that works.
The Reflecting Pool Is Now the Wrong Color
Trump promised the reflecting pool renovation would turn the water 'American-flag blue.' It did not turn American-flag blue. According to The Guardian, algae turned it green shortly after completion. Under overcast light, a retired lawyer visiting from Paris described it as looking black.
Thirteen million dollars. Algae won.
The Arlington Memorial Bridge, a gorgeous neoclassical structure built in 1932 with gold statues and stone columns, is currently wrapped in tarpaulin. The view from the Mall that tourists have been photographing for decades is now a construction site with chain-link fences draped in black fabric. The Guardian spoke with visitors who flew in for trips they had been planning for years, only to find the landmarks they came to see are either closed, fenced off, or buried under scaffolding.
Locals Are Using the Word 'Occupation' Without Irony
The area around the White House has been sealed off to an extent that locals and visitors find genuinely disorienting. The Ellipse, Pennsylvania Avenue, Lafayette Square, all of it restricted, all of it fenced. A large crane now dominates the skyline over the White House itself. Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, told The Guardian flatly: 'It is a different city right now.'
On the day The Guardian visited Lafayette Square, a sign on the fence read: 'We are making DC safe and beautiful.' A newlywed couple named Julie and Robert, who declined to give their last names, were standing in front of it. Julie's assessment: 'The irony. It's neither safe, nor beautiful.' Robert, a retired US history professor from Brooklyn, had a sharper take: 'Everything that I've seen is to honor Donald Trump, not America's 250th anniversary.'
A 62-year-old children's book author from Tampa named Norma Roth told The Guardian she was staring at rows of porta potties left on the Ellipse after a UFC event Trump hosted on his own birthday on June 14. The UFC fight, on the White House's South Lawn, on the president's birthday, surrounded by temporary toilets. 'It's so symbolic of what he's doing to the country,' she said. 'It's like he's shitting all over our nation's capital.' She was wearing a Bruce Springsteen concert T-shirt that said 'Elections Matter.' Norma Roth is doing more editorial work than most columnists right now.
And Then There's the Triumphal Arch
Almost forgot: the administration also unveiled plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch to be built south of the Potomac River near Arlington National Cemetery. A triumphal arch. In the tradition of the Arc de Triomphe, which Napoleon built to celebrate his military victories.
Washington DC is famously, deliberately, a low-rise city. Height restrictions exist specifically so no private building towers over the Capitol or the monuments. Preservationists say a 250-foot arch would permanently alter that skyline in ways that cannot be undone. The Guardian reports critics have already raised alarms. The administration has not appeared to lose any sleep over it.
Happy Birthday, America, You Can't Get In
This is all theoretically in service of the United States' 250th anniversary, the semiquincentennial, the big one, a milestone that genuinely deserves celebration and that most Americans across the political spectrum would agree is worth marking with some dignity and care.
What is actually happening, according to The Guardian's on-the-ground reporting, is that the most iconic public spaces in the country's capital are closed or obscured or half-finished, and the construction boom is churning through taxpayer money at a rate that keeps exceeding the numbers the president stated publicly. Meanwhile, the flagship project, the reflecting pool, is green.
Mark, the 68-year-old retired lawyer visiting from Paris, told The Guardian he remembered being forced to stand at that same reflecting pool during the 1976 bicentennial because the crowds were so massive. Fifty years later, he was taking selfies in front of water that looked black, behind a fence, next to tarpaulin. 'I don't know if it's a success or failure,' he said. A reasonable man leaving the door open. The evidence, unfortunately, is not.
The Dingo Take
Here is what is actually going on. Trump needed a project. The 250th anniversary handed him a deadline and a blank check of patriotic cover, and he took it. The result is a capital city that looks like a mall under renovation, where the signature achievement is a reflecting pool that turned the wrong color and a ballroom that costs $200 million more than advertised and is half-funded by the taxpayers he said wouldn't pay for it. The no-bid contract going to the same company doing two of the biggest projects is the kind of thing that would have generated months of congressional hearings in any previous administration. Right now it is a paragraph in a construction update.
The retired professor standing outside a chain-link fence around Lafayette Square put it best. You have a man with the instincts of an absolute monarch presiding over the celebration of American independence from a constitutional monarch. That is not a small irony. That is the entire story told in one sentence by a guy on vacation who just wanted to see the park.
Semiquincentennial planning should mean thinking about what this country means, what it has been through, what it wants to be. What it apparently means in practice is a $600 million ballroom, a green reflecting pool, a triumphal arch that will loom over a military cemetery, and rows of porta potties on the lawn where the fight was. If you wanted to design a metaphor from scratch, you could not do better than that last one. Norma Roth from Tampa already did the work.
