I went by the White House a few times in the last couple weeks to check out the UFC cage and other projects in the neighborhood related to Donald Trump's debacle of a sestercentennial celebration, called Freedom 250, and his “Safe and Beautiful Initiative,” a relentless plan that will alter and shittify D.C. physically and otherwise permanently and for no reason more obvious than “Because he can.” Yeah, Trump’s beautifying the Nation's Capital the way Sherman beautified Atlanta.
I hadn’t been to the city’s sightseeing epicenter in months before the latest binge of field trips, which were inspired by photos circulating of garish staging for the June 14 MMA event/Trump birthday party towering over the White House grounds. It's so much worse in person.
Trump and UFC are claiming 3,000 invitees will pay as much as $1.5 million to be on the South Lawn on Trump’s birthday to see the fights in person. The latest buzz, however, is that non-political celebs would rather rearrange their sock drawers than attend Trump's shindig. The promoter claims another 85,000 fans will show up to the Ellipse, a formerly beautiful green space between the White House and the National Mall, to watch on big screen televisions. (There’s no way in hell that many folks will go to a UFC watch party.)
Were we not already deep into the post-shame era as a nation, there would be so many reasons for Americans to be embarrassed about how the country is commemorating its founding. The original celebration was planned over the last decade by a bipartisan group set up by Congress in 2016 called America250, only to have Trump hijack the party and turn control over to a MAGA-aligned group he founded, Freedom 250. Nothing’s going well with the party designed by Trump's party.
By now everybody knows about the American State Fair concert series scheduled for the Mall becoming Trump’s Fyre Festival. One band after another from an already embarrassingly passe talent roster bailed on the president's music show, claiming to have been misled about the political bent of the affair. Basically, they thought they were signing on to the bipartisan bash. By the time Trump finally pulled the plug on all the Freedom 250 shows last week, everybody but Vanilla Ice had told him to fuck off. But the massive staging's already taking up space. So Trump gave himself a speaking gig as a replacement, with comical crooner Lee Greenwood as his opening act. Another of the White House-sanctioned Freedom 250 gatherings on the Mall, something called a National Prayer Jubilee, ended absurdly with a fuel spill that threatened to turn the hallowed federal grounds into a Superfund site.
But, familiar as we've become with absurd outcomes from this administration, having a UFC card as the most publicized event of the official celebration should still humiliate us all.
There's the tale of how the relatively new and totally niche pastime of MMA ended up getting the showcase gig of the whole Freedom 250 shebang: UFC boss Dana White, a famously worker-unfriendly bully who addressed the last Republican Party convention, is by far the sportsworld’s loudest Trump booster; the UFC has a new TV deal with Paramount, which is owned by Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who donated an eight-figure portion of his mid-11-figure nest egg to boost Trump's latest presidential run and in exchange got the federal government’s permission to acquire media giant Paramount, and in return said thanks to the president for getting the anti-trust gatekeepers to look the other way by demolishing the network’s historically tough-on-Trump news division and even 60 Minutes; and, again: “Because he can.” Nothing speaks to American patriotism like cronyism, plus a fight card co-headlined by champion fighters from Spain and Brazil.
On my first trip down, a week and a half ago, I parked on Constitution Avenue NW, which is now as close as a regular guy can get to the White House even on foot, what with its steroidally expanded perimeter. I’ve been looking at the building my whole life. And while I never could describe exactly what makes a building “stately,” the White House had always looked stately as hell. It no longer looks stately. It looks ridiculous. I’d heard before showing up that the UFC trappings, which include massive metal rails that connect above where the steel cage will be, made it appear Trump now had a roller-coaster on his lawn and turned the backyard into a Six Flags. That fits.
And we’re talking a really down-in-the-dumps theme park, since there’s so much construction equipment and fencing and detritus related to Trump’s other destruction projects on the grounds. He demolished the East Wing to add a ballroom that for now is designed to be two-thirds bigger than what’s left of the main residence. He’d already paved the Rose Garden, blackened the sidewalks and gilded the White House walls. He plans to coat the Old Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House compound, with white paint. The building, which opened in the 1880s, has never been painted. The EOB’s exterior is granite. Every architect and engineer who has weighed in says painting granite is costly and possibly destructive.
His damage to D.C. transcends the White House gates, of course. Giving us the highest unemployment rate of any city in the country wasn't enough. The whole Mall area is a mess of construction fencing, scaffolding, heavy equipment, and klieg lights. I saw all that, plus lots of National Guard troops and war vehicles, as I walked from the Washington Monument over to the Lincoln Memorial, another formerly stately setting where the UFC fighters will face off before the fights. They'll do so while standing beneath the engraved words of the Gettysburg address, and from the same steps where Marian Anderson sang when other local venues turned her away for not being white, and where Martin Luther King spoke of his dream. They will brag insincerely about how they’re going to beat each other’s ass.
The mood at the Memorial is no longer serene. Black fencing blocks the walkways around the adjacent Reflecting Pool, as well as the view of the pool. I’d never heard anybody speak of the shallow pool with anything but reverence before Trump said it “never had the color people wanted” and began devoting more time to recoloring the pool than he did trying to get out of the Iran quagmire. He decided on a hue called “American flag blue,” a name he made up for the renovation, or whatever the right word is for what he's doing.
The guy has announced an ungodly number of fucked up plans on and around the Mall. His dumbass arch will overwhelm the circle on the west side of the Memorial Bridge if it ever happens (this won't happen). The horse statues on the bridge on both sides of the river were covered by tarps and scaffolding on my trips because Trump, whose tastefulness recalls Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, handed out a $5 million no-bid contract to coat the bronze statues with 24-karat gold. He’s closing the historically affordable golf course at East Potomac Park to the south of the Mall allegedly to replace it with a track that will host PGA tournaments (this won't happen). And he’s eliminating soccer and softball and frisbee fields on the mall for his National Garden of American Heroes, which Trump says will someday feature a rendering of …Julia Child? On Thursday he broke the news that construction of the “Trump Promenade” from the back of the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River would soon commence (this won't happen). Only god knows what the future of the Kennedy Center just up the river looks like, but it’s not the Trump Kennedy Center.
Yet for all the sad, harmful wackiness, nothing’s sadder or wackier than Trump’s Reflecting Pool riffs, which are off the wall enough to be a Monty Python skit. He has called it “the Reflecting Pond” and “the Reflecting Lake at the Lincoln Monument.” He damaged the pool and delayed completion of the overkill overhaul by getting his motorcade to drive onto it. On Wednesday in the Oval Office he held up a chart titled “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers,” which he actually compared the pool’s size to big buildings for reasons that were never explained. He was rightly mocked the world over for what at any other point in this country’s 250-year history would be considered bizarre presidential behavior. For example: Modern Ghana, a news site based in the capital city of Accra, picked up a story headlined, “Trump compares Reflecting Pool to skyscrapers.”
He brought the same placard out for the press again Thursday, while announcing that the refilling of the Reflecting Pool was starting, and lying that it was “the longest pool in the world” and “200 feet wide.” “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it,” he said. Hell no, they haven’t.
There were lots of groups of students on school field trips on the Mall while I was taking my own sad tours. I wanted to tell the kids, "Sorry," and that things weren’t always like this and hopefully won't be like this for long, but was too depressed to say anything. Oh, well. Happy birthday, America. Enjoy the fights.
