Surveying Trump's Damage to the National Mall
By James S. Russell
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I’ve been writing a lot about the bowdlerization of the White House and the grand historic landscape that unites it with the National Mall. I fear some readers are put off; after all, a badly made building addition pales before the much more serious dismantling of the democratic system America was founded on. At no time in the history of the country has such commercialization, politicization, and trivializing of Washington’s most sacred precinct been countenanced. This is the physical (and possibly permanent) expression of the violence being done to the nation itself—so ironic as we attempt to celebrate 250 years of our liberation from monarchy.
By bike I spent June 8 and 9 roaming Washington’s monumental core, an area that encompasses much more than the greensward that sweeps from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. I am seeking to convey the nature and scale of the alterations underway, even though they change daily. This is the first of a two-part précis of what I learned.
Washington has such a vast, grand public realm thanks to Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city, with its rigid grid dotted by public squares and crossed by grand diagonal boulevards. It emulated the kind of Baroque city plans laid out for Popes and monarchs, but it has well accommodated institutions of representative government and the commercial city that filled in the city’s street grid.
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Fortified White House
The White House ballroom wing is Trump’s signature effort to remake the symbolism of the White House and bend it to his own gilded reality. But for a towering crane, not a glimpse of the enormous construction site was possible when I visited, since enormous fences, many opaque, have been erected around the White House grounds and the green swath that unites it with the Mall proper.
https://www.postalley.org/2026/07/02/surveying-trumps-damage-to-the-national-mall/