President Donald Trump is working on vanity projects all over Washington DC, from renovating the Reflecting Pool to destroying the White House East Wing to build a ballroom. While there have been many reports on the quality and legality of these various projects, there has been relatively less coverage of how Washington workers react to these projects — until now.
Read more George Will delivers blistering rebuke of Trump’s most ‘unstable’ loyalist
“President Donald Trump’s goons cannot keep up with his insatiable need to leave a physical legacy across the nation’s capital,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Vic Verbalaitis on Wednesday based on a report by his colleague, political correspondent Farrah Tomazin. Speaking with journalist Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast, Tomazin reported that federal workers are struggling to keep up with Trump’s various — and often unexpectedly announced — projects.
From the Great American State Fair structures and his White House lawn UFC fight to his various renovations in Washington DC, Tomazin told Coles that the president “claims he is a world-class builder. I guess the fact that a lot of these projects are just rushed through—I mean, we had no idea until not long ago that he was suddenly going to be creating an ‘American Flag Blue’ Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.”
She added, “Nobody voted for it, nobody knew about it not that long ago, and suddenly, he couldn’t stop talking about it. And that’s the thing with Donald Trump.”
While Tomazin speculates that Trump is focusing on building physical monuments to create a legacy for himself, she said that doing so is taking a toll on the capital’s workforce.
“Government sources tell me within various departments that they’re just scrambling,” Tomazin said. “They’ll suddenly be hit with this … idea that he’s … bragged about—’Oh, I want a reflecting pool to be American flag blue,’ and … suddenly, you know, they’ve gotta … start scrambling.”
Read more Delusional Trump thinks he can flip a war on and off like a light
In the most recent example, Trump is planning to hold a Freedom 250 Grand Prix where cars will race up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, the street adjacent to the White House.
“The streets are about to be blocked off in August so that cars can drive at 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue—a street that’s made for 25 miles-an-hour limits,” Tomazin said. “It’s quite bonkers, actually, but this is the president.”
In addition to upsetting Washington workers, Trump’s various renovations have aroused considerable controversy because they alter monuments that are widely beloved. When he put his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he was required by a court order to remove it, a fact he has tried to conceal by keeping a tarp over the institution’s edifice. He also was criticized for destroying the White House’s historic East Wing to create space for his ballroom.
“This jack—— in the f—— White House is destroying a permanent structure that can’t come back,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) wrote on his Substack in March. “He can’t do this on his own! There’s a rigorous, rigorous process to mess with the restructuring, structural changes of the White House, and he just blows right through all of that!”
Read more Former intel official warns Trump has a ‘Doomsday Book’ to upset elections
