All The President’s Contractors
Key takeaways
- The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge connects two incongruous quadrants of Washington, D.C.
- He had been on the bridge for three days when, a couple of miles away, Secret Service agents shot and wounded an armed man outside the Washington Monument.
- Few aspects of the President’s job animate him more than his construction sites around Washington.
Glasser.
The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge connects two incongruous quadrants of Washington, D.C. On one side, Fort Mc Nair, a military base, where several top Trump Administration officials now live along Generals’ Row, sits blocks from the Navy Yard’s gleaming new development projects: facial bars, rooftop brunches. Fifteen hundred feet or so due east, across the Anacostia River, the poverty rate is double the city’s average. Late last week, a shoeless Florida man scaled his way to the top of the Douglass Bridge and unfurled a long black banner as a symbol of “shame and grief” about the war in Iran and the existential threat of A.I. Police diverted traffic and tried to reach the man by phone to negotiate his descent; he set up a tent on one of the bridge’s towering arches. Fireworks from the Nationals game went off around him. Onlookers gathered to stare up at the solitary man, on his perch above the Anacostia.
He had been on the bridge for three days when, a couple of miles away, Secret Service agents shot and wounded an armed man outside the Washington Monument. A teen-age bystander was hit in the crossfire. At President Trump’s orders, the nearby Reflecting Pool had been drained so that the Park Service could clean out goose-poop stains. Trump was in the East Room of the White House, talking about granite. “I built a lot of swimming pools, hundreds of swimming pools at different times,” he told a group of small-business owners. “So I have some very good contractors. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor, fellas, go take a look at the Reflecting Pool that sits in between Lincoln and Washington, the beautiful—what should be a reflecting pool.’ ” He said that the granite was leaking and needed to be resurfaced. He’d already had his “gold guy” come up to Washington to adorn the Oval Office with various flourishes, and to make gold, cursive signage to label several White House locations: “The Presidential Walk of Fame,” “The Rose Garden.” (Trump paved over the Rose Garden last year to put down a concrete patio.) Now, working with his “pool guy,” he had sandblasted the Reflecting Pool and coated the bottom, which used to be gray, in a color called American Flag Blue. He first teased this change at an event on drug affordability. “They call it a pool, lake, and pond,” he said. “Every day is different, but the word ‘reflecting’ is a good term.”