Trump’s weird D.C.-specific initiatives, ranked

The good, the bad, and the merely wasteful

National Guard personnel inspect the exhibits at the Great American State Fair on June 26, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Stringer via Getty Images)

Donald Trump does a lot of weird stuff.

Broadly speaking, he does a lot of unusual stuff. Much of that is shockingly corrupt, like the cryptocurrency scams or having his kids roam the world making various business deals while also serving as key advisors. And a lot of it is menacing and authoritarian, like pardoning the January 6 rioters.

Some of it, though, is just genuinely strange.

He keeps messing around with local affairs here in D.C., for example, often in ways that don’t serve any real ideological purpose or even offer opportunity for corruption. He’s just a guy who, I guess befitting his background as a real estate developer, likes naming things after himself, a kind of egomaniac who’s also interested in questions related to the built environment.

Part of the genuine eccentricity of Trump’s engagement with these local issues is that as someone who lives here, it’s been a real mixed bag on the merits.

To an extent, he’s pulled off what no Democratic Party president could get away with and devoted extra taxpayer resources to civic improvements in the nation’s very blue capital city. He’s also been extraordinarily wasteful and undisciplined and at times appallingly devoted to his own ego.

So as part of our celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, here’s my definitive and extremely objective ranking.

The absolute worst

Trying to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center” is genuinely appalling.

I try to be a rational person. I love effective altruism. I think we should assess political leaders primarily through the concrete impact their choices have on the world. What name is on the side of the city’s premier performing-arts center doesn’t “matter.”

But what the fuck?

• It’s gauche in general to name things after living people.

• You can’t name something after yourself — that’s psychotic.

What’s more, it’s always controversial to rename anything, but I do think we have a clear understanding that if you rename something that is already named for someone, that’s a deliberate act of disrespect.

When Yale decided it didn’t want a college named after John Calhoun anymore, Calhoun College became Grace Hopper College. Like that call or hate it, the point was to cancel John Calhoun. You can’t just call it “Hopper Calhoun College” as a compromise. That’s stupid.

The whole Trump Kennedy Center debacle is so dumb and so egomaniacal that it drives me insane.

Kat Rosenfield sometimes takes shit that she doesn’t deserve from progressives (I highly recommend her account of being canceled before it was cool), so I get where she was coming from emotionally when she scolded liberals for shunning the newly renamed Trump Kennedy Center.

But no.

This was some outrageous shit Trump pulled that violated all kinds of settled norms. It had extremely predictable consequences for the arts, all of which are Trump’s fault. Sometimes, the Orange Man is just bad.

Shitty, but I get it

Trump’s basic view that there ought to be something in Memorial Circle is clearly correct and, in fact, the original intent was to place large columns there. But the circle (and more notably the bridge that leads into it) was constructed in the 1920s and the columns got canceled to facilitate the then-new technology of airplanes having a safe flight path.

An aerial view of Memorial Circle and Arlington Memorial Bridge. (National Park Service photo)

In this case, I’m not left wondering what this moron was thinking.

Every prior president was probably too busy focusing on the important parts of the job to dream up a specific monument for this location. And Trump too should probably be meeting with advisors and talking about the cost of living rather than drawing plans for arches.

I dislike the arch idea in particular because America doesn’t really have the kind of singular imperial military triumph that a triumphal arch traditionally celebrates. Also arches are really Paris’s thing: It’s not just the Arc de Triomphe — they have an entire axis of three monumental arches spanning the city. The United States should have its own thing.

But I get what Trump is doing, conceptually.

Similarly, while you cannot illegally construct a gaudy ballroom with corporate bribe money and then try to use an assassination attempt as political leverage to get Congress to bail you out, the idea of expanding the physical footprint of the White House makes perfect sense.

I don’t have any strong opinions about ballrooms, per se, but I have been in the West Wing several times over the course of my career, and what you have there is a lot of the people doing the most important jobs in the country dealing with cramped working spaces. I was also once invited to a White House social event that they did on the lawn because there wasn’t enough space in the East Wing, and it turned out to be one of those early June D.C. days when it’s 96 degrees and humid and everyone is out there in suits and you’re afraid someone is going to die.

I think the whole situation calls for something in the spirit of I.M. Pei’s famous addition to the Louvre to get a modern office facility on the White House grounds.

Squarely in the middle

The fact that Trump drained the Reflecting Pool, repainted it, and then bragged that he’d solved an algae problem that has plagued the National Park Service for decades only to discover that he actually didn’t solve it at all is not important. But it is a potent metaphor for much of his administration — notably the war with Iran, which played out on a parallel timeline and similarly ended with Trump discovering that he in fact could not secure a better deal than the one the Obama administration had already bequeathed to him.

But in typical Trump fashion, he didn’t just say something like, “I tried but it didn’t work and now the question is whether Congress wants to appropriate money for a very expensive rebuild of the filtration system or if everyone should just learn to live with algae.” He’s gone off on a whole insane binge of lying about the situation, arresting people for touching the water, and so forth. Meanwhile, you have center-right people complaining that the media is too obsessed with the Reflecting Pool when it doesn’t matter. To which I say: Sure. But Trump made a huge deal out of this and now wants to wriggle out of talking about it because it’s an embarrassing failure, which is not only Trump’s approach to Iran but also the whole conservative movement’s approach to Trump!

Fine by me, albeit dumb

As a patriotic Washingtonian and a loyal member of the #resistance, you’re supposed to claim to hate that Trump has deployed uniformed National Guard personnel on the city streets.

The truth is that what Trump is doing here is pretty stupid, but its only concrete impacts are beneficial.

For months now, we’ve had small groups of National Guard members patrolling parts of the city, usually in groups of four or more. They seem to work mostly nine to five and in high-profile areas where they’re likely to be seen. There are a lot around Union Station, a lot on the Mall, and always a few strolling around 14th Street where there are a lot of restaurants. They’re often patrolling near downtown Metro stations. This is just not the tactical deployment pattern you would use if you seriously wanted to fight crime, which would involve sending people to high-crime neighborhoods at night.

What’s more, the Guard can’t really fight crime, because they don’t have any arrest authority.

That being said, despite the lack of arrest authority or appropriate deployment, the Guard has impacted crime in D.C.

Erich Battistin, Richard Hahn, Samantha Pérez-Dávila, and Borui Sun released a report about recent crime declines in Washington and found that the reduction in shootings and murders is due almost entirely to an increase in the intensity of police activity. Cops started making more proactive arrests — narcotics sweeps, traffic stops, warrant enforcement — and this accomplished what good preemptive policing tends to accomplish. People got caught carrying illegal handguns, which led to some bad guys getting locked up and others deciding it was more prudent to leave the guns at home.

The Guard deployments, by contrast, are associated with a decline in opportunistic property crimes in the times and places where the Guard was deployed.

I think there’s some reason to believe they could’ve been much more effective at combating serious crime had they been in the right places. But they weren’t. They did reduce crime where they were, though.

Local media coverage of this finding has been quite negative for Trump, highlighting the researchers’ finding that the cost-effectiveness of using the National Guard like this is terrible. Guard troops are much more expensive than regular police officers, but also less effective at fighting crime.

So this is a pretty dumb idea all things considered.

That said, as a D.C. resident, if Trump wants to waste federal dollars on reducing petty theft in my neighborhood, I’m not going to object too strongly.

Good, actually

Last but not least, Trump has seriously spruced up some of the aforementioned National Park Service-run urban parks.

I don’t want to exaggerate this. In typical Trump fashion, rather than taking a comprehensive look at the federal government’s genuinely extensive landholdings in the city, he focused a lot on a handful of fountains that tourists are likely to see.

But the fact that these fountains languished in disrepair for years was a real source of frustration to a lot of people in the city, and a number of friends were quietly asking me at one point if I understood how Trump had managed to finally get the Interior Department to care about this. Speaking as someone who was pretty impressed with Doug Burgum’s tenure as governor of North Dakota, who praised him when he was selected for the cabinet, and who has felt burned by his cartoonish behavior around energy issues since taking office, I was really hoping there was a Burgum Redemption Arc here.

The actual answer here turns out to be more banal.

The Park Service needed extra money to make those repairs, but since D.C. is not represented in Congress, Congress kept failing to appropriate the money.

But the N.P.S. collects fees at many national parks, and that money is used to support repairs, among other things. Traditionally that’s meant cycling the money back into the parks that the fees are collected from. But Trump’s idea was that he could poach fee revenue generated by Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and other popular parks and use some of it to fix up the urban parks here in Washington.

As someone who lives in D.C. and is not really much of an outdoorsman, I strongly endorse this course of action.

I also strongly suspect that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had taken fee revenue away from our patriotic heartland parks and used it to make my neighborhood nicer, they would have ended up impeached. Instead, Republican members of Congress are silent on Trump taking money away from their states to dedicate to local activities in D.C., and there are 10 Democratic senators¹ issuing low-key complaints about it.

Fundamentally, though, for all his many flaws, Trump is America’s first urbanist president. He’s a born and raised New Yorker like me, a Knicks fan, a guy who spiked global oil prices for months with his war in Iran, made cars more expensive with tariffs, and fundamentally understands that urban parks are more important than rural recreation.

So as America heads toward the semiquincentennial, I want to thank Trump for that.

1. Plus Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democratic Party.