Trump Trashes Washington

When the metaphors turn into reality.

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There is a photograph taken by WUSA TV reporter Spencer Allen Brooks from the air on the morning of June 19, and you should look at it before you read another word.

The shot is wide, and it takes a moment to sink in, but there it is, a perfect metaphor for the work of Donald John Trump colliding with reality.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool glows a sick fluorescent green, algae-choked, dead. Behind it, the Ellipse lies stripped to bare dirt, fifty-two acres of brown scab where the soft grass used to be.

One frame. Two monuments to the same man’s instincts, side by side, and nobody had to stage it. Donald Trump did all of it himself. In the upper right of the frame, we see the Capitol, the site of another of Trump’s attempts to redecorate Washington, D.C., in his foul image, but the physical damage done there has been repaired. (The moral damage is ongoing.)

This is the week the metaphor of his destructive tendencies stopped being a metaphor.

For years the people who study Trump have reached for the obvious image. Wrecking ball. He breaks what he touches. He rots institutions the way rust rots steel, slowly and then all at once.

Everything Trump Touches Dies, as some of us have been saying since back when saying it got you uninvited from the green room. It was always a figure of speech, a way of describing what he does to people and courts and agencies and the rule of law and the Republican Party I spent my career building before it ate itself.

It’s not a figure of speech anymore. He has done it to the literal ground of the capital. Stone, water, dirt, and grass. The wreckage is visible from a helicopter.

Start with the pool. Trump looked at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the long gray mirror where Martin Luther King stood and told a quarter million people about a dream, and decided the real problem was the paint job. Too gray. Too “filthy.” He wanted it “American flag blue.”

So Interior shoveled a $14.7 million no-bid contract at a Virginia coatings outfit owned by a ludicrously on-the-nose criminal, plus another no-bid sweetheart deal to an Ohio company owned by a Trump donor who just happens to summer near Mar-a-Lago, and they drained the thing and painted the bottom of it like an above-ground pool from Temu. Trump drove past during construction and bragged. “It never had the color people wanted, but now it’s going to have the great color.”

Within two weeks the paint was peeling off in strips and floating on the surface like a dead jellyfish. Within two weeks, the water bloomed a deep swamp green because that is precisely what shallow, sunny, freshly disturbed water fed directly from the Potomac River does, a fact known to every guy in America who has ever owned a pool skimmer net and apparently to no one in this administration.

The Pool is now surrounded by enough cops, National Guard troops, and Federal police to overthrow a small nation. The Park Service is now dumping hydrogen peroxide into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and vacuuming dead algae off the bottom like a busboy at closing time.

And Trump? He’s declared it sabotage. “Radical left lunatics” vandalized the pool. The algae is a crime. People should do years in prison. He painted a national shrine the color of a Mt. Airy Lodge hot tub, the paint failed, and the water turned green right on cue, and his answer is to threaten the citizenry with hard time.

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Now, back to the rubble.

Now the Ellipse. For his 80th birthday, Trump staged a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. A $60 million modern gladiatorial spectacle of oiled men grappling under hot lights, with a steel monstrosity they actually named “the Claw,” and the overflow mob of 85,000 got herded onto the Ellipse to watch on jumbo screens.

President’s Park South. The same patch of ground he packed in 2021 with the crowd of angry and deluded Trumphadis that he aimed at the Capitol like a loaded weapon. When the party left, it left the park looking like Woodstock ‘99 in a drought, a brown wasteland with a few sad islands of green hanging on. Scotts’ Miracle-Gro tossed in a million bucks and a “proprietary grass blend,” which is corporate for “we’ll figure it out.”

The Park Service paperwork about hauling off the equipment somehow forgot to mention restoring the lawn. Nobody has said who fixes the Ellipse, or when, or with what. It just sits there, scorched, a public park burned down for one night of an 80-year-old man watching younger men hit each other for his amusement.

Then the East Wing, and here’s where my sarcasm fails me and where the laughing should stop. In October, with almost no warning, Trump sent the excavators into the East Wing of the White House and tore it down. Not renovated. Flattened. The first major structural demolition of the White House complex since Truman gutted it to the studs in 1948, except that Truman was rescuing a building that was about to fall down around him, and Trump was just clearing room for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom nearly twice the size of the mansion itself. He told Jesse Watters the quiet part, plain as day. “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself, because no one else will.”

A federal judge named Richard Leon has spent months trying to apply the English language to this. When the administration’s lawyers called the demolition an “alteration” under the statute, Leon wrote that you’d need “some brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary” to pull that off.

He called the private-donor funding gimmick a “Rube Goldberg contraption” engineered to dodge Congress. He gently reminded the government that a president is a “steward” of the White House, a temporary tenant, not the landlord with a sledgehammer. None of it landed.

A planning commission Trump packed with his own West Wing aides rubber-stamped the thing anyway, days after Leon ordered the work stopped. The price is up to a billion, now mostly borne by taxpayers, and climbing by the week. The first architect got shoved aside for the crime of clashing with Trump over the ballroom’s metastasizing size, and because his shop was too small to keep pace.

The early renderings featured a grand exterior staircase that climbed majestically to a blank wall with no door, plus fake windows, plus columns positioned to strangle the daylight. He only fixed the staircase to nowhere after the New York Times pointed and laughed.

Add the Kennedy Center, where the farce achieves a kind of perfection. Trump seized the board, crowned himself chairman, bolted his own name onto the building over lawsuits and over the black-letter law, and announced he’d shutter the place for two years to “rebuild” it.

A court ruled the renaming flatly illegal and blocked the closure. So in the small hours of June 13, his people threw up scaffolding, draped an enormous flame-retardant tarp across the entire facade, and scraped his name off behind the curtain where no camera could catch it.

That tarp is still hanging. Ten days, then two weeks, still up, hiding the front of the nation’s performing arts center from every tourist who walks down to the plaza hoping to watch a small man’s vanity get peeled off the marble. The official excuse is “maintenance.” The plaintiffs in court call it what it plainly is: a literal cover-up. A man so mentally incapable of losing that he shrouds a national monument in a tarp rather than let his own country watch his name come down.

Look at what Trump pours his soul into. The columns in the ballroom. The exact saturation of blue at the bottom of the pool. The upholstery on the seats at the Kennedy Center, which one source close to him swears has his fingerprints all over it, just as his fingerprints are all over the ten lawsuits. The man told an interviewer he has “two jobs,” and that the construction one is “like relaxation for me.”

He stood in the West Wing on the exact day the United States was trading proposals to end a shooting war with Iran, and what consumed him? Interrogating a staffer about why some columns looked missing from the latest ballroom rendering.

The gravest decisions a President can make, you know, the little things like war and peace, risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, the fate and future of our nation, and whether a city gets bombed slide past him untouched while he agonizes over crown molding.

He’s gilded the Oval Office in tasteless gold-leaf geegaws, “none of the fake stuff,” he assures visitors, as if the tackiness were the achievement. He ripped out the Kennedy-era Rose Garden lawn and paved it with a stone patio because the grass got soggy and women’s stilettos sank in at his parties, then wired the whole thing for sound so he could DJ off his iPad like a pervy divorced uncle at a Mar-a-Lago quincañera.

He’s reportedly carpeted the White House bathrooms. The People’s House is being slowly redecorated into a 1970s crash pad by a man who genuinely, sincerely believes that gold and stone and his name screwed into a wall are what greatness looks like. If Trump had a shred of taste, you’d know it by now.

This is a specific kind of authoritarian leadership failure, and it has a specific pedigree.

There was another man who styled himself the great builder, who couldn’t be bothered with the grinding work of actually governing but came fully alive over two things: sending people to camps, and building scale models and renderings and the colossal structures that would carry his name into a glorious forever.

Adolf Hitler dreamed of leveling Berlin and raising in its place a capital called Germania, a fever-city of impossible domes and triumphal arches built to make every human who passed beneath them feel like an insect.

He had a man for it, Albert Speer, who drew the plans for the Welthauptstadt Germania, built the models, and fed the fantasy of a thousand-year Reich graven into a monument of stone. They fussed and frittered over the boulevards and the marble while the country Hitler ran descended into evil and depravity.

Germania never rose. What rose instead were the Americans from the west and the Russians from the east, and a sea of rubble, and an evil little man who committed suicide in a hole in the ground beneath the ruins of everything he’d sworn would stand forever.

Spare me the ragey email, MAGA snowflakes.

I am not comparing the body counts. The crimes don’t rhyme, and I won’t insult the dead by pretending they do. I’m comparing the tell.

The same hollow vanity. The same iron conviction that a leader proves his greatness in marble and arches and sheer scale. The same fatal preference for the model over the country. The same congenital inability to grasp that the building was never the point.

And Trump’s even got the props now. A desktop model of his planned triumphal arch for Washington. Renderings of his ballroom/Führerbunker, a new hardened complex the military is digging beneath his ballroom, “droneproof,” with “bio-defense all over.” He keeps telling us what he’s building down there in the dark while he can’t keep paint stuck to a pool in the daylight.

That’s the eternal con of the man who measures himself in monuments. He always promises you a thing that can never be torn down. “The one thing they can’t tear down will be the East Wing,” a source close to him said. “That is his lasting impact.”

The East Wing is gone. He tore it down himself. The pool is green. The lawn is dirt. The Kennedy Center is cowering behind a tarp. Everything Trump touches dies, and now you can finally see it from the air, in a single photograph, on the morning of America’s 250th year.

He promised us a monument. He handed us the rubble, algae, and a moment where we don’t need metaphors to know what he’s done to Washington and the country.

The reality is right in front of us.

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