Trump won’t rest until DC is just one massive gold pile of crap
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/5/14/800038835/whitehouse/trump-wont-rest-until-dc-is-just-one-massive-gold-pile-of-crap/
Trump won’t rest until DC is just one massive gold pile of crap
In a move that the Washington Post is desperately trying to gentlewash as simply “unusual,” it appears that President Donald Trump has been trying to staple an entirely different contract for construction at the White House, over a mile away, to his efforts to build his Big Dumb Arch.
The administration loves this sort of One Weird Trick garbage, where it comes up with some utterly preposterous idea that Trump thinks absolves him of any obligation to follow the law. This time around, he wants to use an existing contract for engineering work at the White House complex, which is over a mile away, and s-t-r-e-t-c-h it to somehow also cover work on the arch.
Here’s the dumb, corrupt thinking: Work on the White House complex doesn’t require the competitive bidding process that work on the arch does, what with the proposed site for the arch not being remotely near the White House. But why let such a little quibble stop Trump from building his dream arch, right?
National Park Service Acting Director Jessica Bowron has, regrettably, become an eager partner in this desecration, pretending that this idea just came to her out of the blue rather than being the latest Trump scheme. On April 22, Bowron wrote to the White House to ask if gosh, curious idea, what if they did exactly the sort of thing Trump keeps doing, but totally her idea: “I realize it’s a little further afield than Lafayette Park, but given the engagement on this project from the WH, I thought I’d check.”
One of the ways you can tell that this little exchange was a complete fiction, a fait accompli, is that Heather Martin, from Trump’s Executive Office, took only an hour to get back to Bowron to give her the go-ahead, saying, “Yes of course.”
Really had to think about it there, huh?
Of course, it doesn’t take a super-long time to decide to ignore all laws and rules and just forge ahead, as that’s the entire ethos of the Trump administration and all its denizens are pretty good at it by now. So they’ll just pretend that a government contract is infinitely malleable and can be used anywhere at any time, simply so Trump doesn’t have to follow the rules.
The administration has already begun preliminary surveys and site testing for the arch. However, at the same time, it is telling the court that the plaintiffs who have sued to stop this nonsense have no standing to sue, because there has been no final decision yet. It’s the ballroom dance all over again.
Trump has already seized a ton of taxpayer money for his arch by routing it through the National Endowment for the Humanities, as if Trump’s tacky gold-plated oversized monstrosity is some great American achievement for which the American people decided to give him $32 million. In reality, Trump had the DOGE boys kill all actual NEH grants and then just yoinked that money for his own purposes.
Another way it is obvious the administration has already made a decision to build the arch is that the Department of the Interior already asked the Federal Aviation Administration to do a formal aeronautical study, as the FAA requires that anything exceeding 200 feet that could interfere with airspace be reviewed.
The arch is going to be 250 feet tall, but thanks to site elevation, it will tower at 279 feet, smack in the middle of an incredibly busy flight corridor. It’s the one where, at the start of Trump’s second term, a Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines plane, killing 67 people. That corridor sees around 900 flights per day. PER. DAY.
A functioning FAA might push back on plopping an obstacle in the middle of this, but the FAA’s parent agency, the Department of Transportation, is run by Sean Duffy. Well, occupied by, really, since he seems to have taken most of the year off for an all-expenses-paid road trip and reality show-filming jamboree.
Meanwhile, Trump is also planning to spend $7.5 million to paint the Eisenhower Building because he thinks it should match the White House. Masterful design sense, sir.
Then there’s the reflecting pool boondoggle, which was supposed to cost $1.8 million, but has since jumped to $13.1 million.
Do we really need to say that the “repairs” here are so shoddy that Trump, who earlier said he picked the contractor, now says he doesn’t know him. It’s probably totally fine that there are already “bubbles and small holes” in one of the waterproof layers, right? And it’s definitely no big deal that an “uneven application of the tinted waterproofing left the pool mottled in varying shades of blue.”
It isn’t just that Trump is wrecking Washington, D.C. It isn’t just that he’s stealing our money to do it. It isn’t just that his taste is terrible. It’s that despite having all the money in the world, Trump will always try to cut corners and hand a deal off to a crony, so not only do we get corruption, we get a capital city that looks like rubbish. The very worst person with the very worst taste is a one-man wrecking ball.
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