I recently moved away from Washington, but there’s no way to escape propagandistic imagery of the President’s urban vanity projects.
For nearly eight years, while living in Washington, D.C., I often played out a thought experiment in my mind: Which Presidential candidate would Americans vote for if they knew, as I and my fellow-D.C.ers did, that the winning candidate would be moving into their proverbial back yard? More than ninety-three per cent of District constituents voted against Donald Trump in the 2024 election, only to find themselves living in a city remade in Trump’s image.
Last August, D.C. provided an early proving ground for the deployment of the National Guard in cities. I watched troops chase delivery drivers on Eighteenth Street, the stretch of dive bars and restaurants that entertain the city’s crowd of earnest twentysomethings, and then, eight months later, patrol aimlessly in groups of four outside of grocery stores and in public parks in the middle of quiet afternoons. Huge banners with Trump’s face on them went up on the headquarters of the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture. In December, board members installed by Trump voted to rename the Kennedy Center the Trump-Kennedy Center and had its new name emblazoned on the façade. Fences rose not just in front of the White House but around parks; in March, the grass at Logan Circle was fenced off with chain-link and opaque mesh, preventing pedestrians from crossing the park, and plans were announced to close the top of Meridian Hill Park, a popular gathering spot, for most of the summer. Trump also demolished the East Wing of the White House, of course, to make way for a vast ballroom. In case the architectural iconoclasm wasn’t enough to offend, some of the rubble from the torn-down building was dumped on the grounds of the public East Potomac Golf Links. For many locals, these incursions into the sites of daily life represented a kind of siege against which they had little recourse.
It doesn’t much matter whether all of Trump’s designs become physical fact; the imagery is enough to achieve its intended effect of eliciting aggrieved attention. Trump is putting his stamp on the city of Washington, D.C., the way Nero put his stamp on Rome, turning it into a twenty-first-century Domus Aurea. The momentousness of the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary creates a pretext for, say, spending five million dollars to gild four bronze horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial with thick gold leaf, or for mocking up a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bill bearing Trump’s glowering mug shot. (There is, blessedly, a law against printing a living person on currency.) Then there is the United States Triumphal Arch, which is perhaps Trump’s version of Nero’s Colossus, a proposed two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall structure at one end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Its design is neoclassical in the extreme, with golden eagles and an angelic, Statue of Liberty-esque figure at its apex. But the more ornate the plans, the more they throw into relief Trump’s disregard for the parts of the District where people actually live.
There are some bright spots for D.C. residents. After a years-long effort, the cascading fountains in Meridian Hill Park are running once more. Fountains outside of Union Station are flowing, too (and the basins are more aquamarine than Old Glory Blue). And the proliferation of D.C. propaganda online belies the reality that Trump’s most egregious urban vanity projects are facing significant headwinds. Last week, a judge ruled that the Kennedy Center’s name change was illegal without congressional approval and set a deadline of fourteen days for the removal of its updated signage. Five musicians have dropped out of a vaunted Freedom 250 celebration in D.C. (though Vanilla Ice has said that he still plans to perform, noting, “I don’t even vote”). The reflecting-pool repainting, too, is facing a lawsuit alleging that it amounts to “aesthetic injury.” For that crime, at least, Trump is certainly on the hook. ♦
