Jackie Calmes: As we approach July 4, the capital is, fittingly, a mess

Just a month out from America’s celebration of its 250th birthday, the national capital is a mess.

And I’m talking about the sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington, especially the White House. The once-verdant park remains a construction site, with makeshift fencing only partly obscuring the vast scar that was once the East Wing and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. Cranes sway in place of the felled trees, to build President Donald Trump’s billion-dollar ballroom despite court orders and overwhelming public opinion against it. The South Lawn has been replaced with a gargantuan circus-tent-like arena for Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches and a Trump-picked audience of thousands. Yes, cage matches. To mark not the nation’s birthday but the president’s 80th on June 14.

Because it’s all about Trump.

Nearby, the Reflecting Pool sweeping from the Lincoln Memorial to the World War II Memorial and Washington Monument remains dry, its water replaced with crews painting the basin “American Flag Blue” - another Trump vanity project that’s millions over budget and behind schedule. Cross over Independence Avenue and the grounds near the Martin Luther King Jr. and Jefferson Memorials are also fenced off, obscuring more construction-related structures for Trump’s unauthorized, possibly illegal “National Garden of American Heroes” for 250 statues of folks as varied as John Adams and Kobe Bryant. Another jarring sight: National Guard troops still needlessly patrol the areas.

At the adjacent Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, four bronze equestrian statues are getting a $5 million coat of 24-carat gold leaf. But there’s worse: For nearly a century, the bridge has offered one of the most beautiful vantages in Washington, an unbroken scenic stretch from the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington side to Arlington National Cemetery and its historic, hilltop Custis-Lee Mansion on the Virginia side.

Every time I drive the route, I’m awed. Trump, however, sees only a site for self-glorification: Work is underway at a small traffic circle in the middle - again, despite pending litigation from veterans and Democrats - for a massive 250-foot triumphal arch dedicated, Trump has said, to “me.”

What triumph justifies such a tribute? Certainly not the war in Iran.

Visitors going up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol see massive banners of Trump hanging from the departments of Labor, Agriculture and, most obscene of all, Justice. They pass the U.S. Mint, charged lately with devising a $250 bill and a $1 coin featuring Trump’s mug.

The banners, the currency and all the rest - it’s hardly the adulatory message appropriate to a people who, by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, renounced a king and went on to create a democratic republic.

As usual in springtime Washington, aka school-trip season, this week I’ve seen dozens of buses disgorging students, many in their identical T-shirts advertising farflung hometowns and schools. I’ve felt somewhat sorry for those young people seeing monumental Washington now, for what might be the only visit of their lives.

Still, this semiquincentennial can be a teaching moment, for all Americans.

The capital’s scars are a metaphor for Trump’s selfish, anti-democratic destructiveness. He contrives his projects one after the other, designs them, picks the architects, contractors and even materials, and lets out the opaque, no-bid contracts, all without consulting Congress or honoring its constitutional power of the purse - until he needs more money, like for the ballroom that he’s said wouldn’t require a dime from taxpayers. When sued, he all but defies the courts, calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against his tributes to himself.

Look on the bright side: But for Trump’s abuses, Americans wouldn’t be giving so much thought on this 250th birthday to the words of the declaration and the Constitution, to the founders’ courage and the framers’ careful balance of powers, and the ways in which those protections need shoring up.

It’s not just Washington that’s suffered Trump’s damaging touch. In Philadelphia, where the declaration was drafted and signed at Independence Hall, the nearby site where George Washington lived as president was horribly marred by the teardown of plaques that had described the founders’ enslavement of people at their properties. Trump is in court, fighting to whitewash that bit of history, instead of allowing it to stand as a testimony to America’s long-running struggle to live by the declaration’s aspirational words: “all men are created equal.”

Fifty years ago, the July 4 bicentennial was all the more resonant because it came soon after the Watergate scandal. “The system worked” was the common refrain then. The system hasn’t been working to curb Trump’s lawless reign; Congress and the Supreme Court instead have been enablers. Yet just in time for the semiquincentennial come signs that the system is working, but from the bottom up: Voters are showing a spirit of ‘26 against the worst, most monarchical president in U.S. history.

And it’s their local celebrations that give the Fourth its meaning, just as John Adams hoped for in a letter 250 years ago to wife, Abigail. The day, he wrote, should be marked ever after by “Shews, Games, Sport, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

Had Trump simply honored Adams’ words, he would have been content to simply be the presider in chief amid the country’s semiquincentennial festivities. And he’d be more popular for it. But that’s not Trump: He’s chosen to play the king in his court of controversy, dividing when unity is wanted.

So it is that seven of nine performers canceled their scheduled appearances at Trump’s planned festivities on the National Mall from June 25 through July 10. That, together with last Friday’s judicial order that he take his name off the Kennedy Center, prompted a 206-word tantrum on social media Saturday night. Trump now threatens to celebrate with a MAGA rally on the Mall instead.

He’s not reading the room, or his dismal polls.

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This story was originally published June 5, 2026 at 4:47 AM.