Donald Trump Celebrates America’s Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth Birthday
Key takeaways
- It’s not just the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been painted, or the East Wing of the White House, which has been reduced to rubble to make room for a massive ballroom that Trump is building.
- In the past year, marketing for Freedom 250, the group organizing events for the semiquincentennial, has covered the city, becoming nearly as ubiquitous as the ads for the defense-technology company Anduril.
- When I visited the fair, on a hazy, drizzly Sunday morning, a few families in matching Smithsonian rain slickers passed through the security checkpoint ahead of me.
The Lede Donald Trump Celebrates America’s Two-Hundred-and-Fiftieth Birthday At the Great American State Fair, in Washington, D.C., and at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, in North Dakota, the President casts himself as the rightful heir to American greatness.
Save this story Save this story Save this story When George Washington signed legislation, in 1790, to create the District of Columbia, a federal capital along the Potomac, the place that we now call Washington was little more than a collection of forest and marshlands. It has been periodically renovated since then. “I can remember that when such Roman palaces as the Commerce Department were being built, we used to wonder, rather innocently, how these huge buildings could ever be filled up with people,” Gore Vidal wrote in 1982, lamenting the city’s transformation from a “pleasant Frenchified southern city” into an “imperial Roman” capital. “While the basilicas and porticoes were going up, one often had the sense that one was living not in a city that was being built but in a set of ruins.”
Last week in Washington, to kick off the Great American State Fair, Trump told attendees on the National Mall that “the city named in honor of George Washington” had been “turned into a national disgrace.” He had returned to office with promises to “beautify” it; now, to mark the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, he was conducting his own round of renovations. “The great civilizations of history did not wallow in aging ruins of the past,” Trump told the crowd. “They created new monuments.” Visitors arriving to celebrate the occasion have found a city full of cranes, scaffolding, and fencing. It’s not just the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which has been painted, or the East Wing of the White House, which has been reduced to rubble to make room for a massive ballroom that Trump is building. On my way to the Great American State Fair, I walked past a poster detailing a “deep energy retrofit" of William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building. The sign bore the logo for “Freedom 250,” which, it announced, was “building for the people of the United States of America in honor of our 250th anniversary.”