The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

On January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case of Trump v. Barbara is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.

Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.

The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks” as citizens, and he noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Fourteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868. Then, in 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. Nonetheless, even then the Supreme Court upheld the citizenship of their children.

Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.

The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”

It seemed the law was settled.

Then, in May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” His assertion came from recent writings by right-wing operatives claiming that the accepted understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong.

As soon as he took office, he issued the executive order saying that individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

One judge after another has sided against Trump on this issue, and on April 1, 2026, when the Supreme Court held oral arguments on the case, Trump became the first president ever to attend such arguments, breaking precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area alongside then–attorney general Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He apparently showed up at the Supreme Court to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him, pressuring them into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.

Today the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts upheld birthright citizenship. But, as Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark notes, the Supreme Court should never have taken this case. The lower court judges who heard the case were appalled that the administration was attacking the clear terms of the Constitution. Judge John Coughenour, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” and said: “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

And yet the vote to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment was not unanimous; it was 6 to 3. And one of those six justices upholding birthright citizenship, Brett Kavanaugh, wrote that his objection to Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship was based not in the Constitution, but rather in his belief that Trump’s executive order violates a law. If Congress rewrote that law, he wrote, he would be willing to overturn birthright citizenship.

Four of nine Supreme Court justices are willing to rewrite the Constitution by fiat.

Although the court’s decision simply upheld the conditions that have been in place for more than a century, MAGA is treating it as a dramatic and dangerous change. “Now that [the Supreme Court] has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement,” wrote right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh. “Militarize the border. Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary. There is no other option.”

Today President Donald J. Trump took his first flight on the new Air Force One, a gift from Qatar. The Constitution prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress, so Trump’s announcement he would accept the $400 million plane from a foreign country raised a bipartisan outcry.

The Pentagon then stepped in to say it would accept the plane. So, officially Qatar gave the plane to the Pentagon, but a source told Aileen Graef of CNN they expect the plane, newly painted in red, white, and blue like Trump’s private jet, to leave the service of the United States when Trump leaves the White House, going to Trump’s presidential library.

Trump told reporters he was “excited about the first flight. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They just completed it, they made it appropriate for a president—that means the security and all the different bells and whistles they put on—very complex stuff. But it’s really quite something.”

“Frankly,” he said, “we couldn’t build a plane like this because we wouldn’t be willing to spend the kind of money necessary. They spent top dollars.” As Marina Dunbar of The Guardian noted, the plane is a retrofitted Boeing 747-8, built in the United States.

Yesterday Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported that last summer, White House officials awarded a no-bid contract for $500 million for the construction of a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be. In turn, the company that got the contract, Clark Construction, told the White House it would award no-bid contracts to at least eleven subcontractors for services including demolition, fencing, excavation, and so on.

To avoid requirements for competitive bidding, the White House said the ballroom was covered by the office of the Executive Residence, which is responsible for routine repairs, buying furniture, and paying entertainment expenses. A federal judge has rejected this same justification for the demolition of the East Wing in the first place, saying the president’s authority to make changes to the White House does not include knocking down one of its wings and building a ballroom in its place.

At one point, Trump said officials from Clark Construction had offered to build his ballroom for free, but for months after he first knocked down the East Wing, he insisted that private donations would pay for the ballroom. On March 31, Trump told reporters: “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

But on June 16, Blaskey and O’Connell reported that more than three weeks before Trump made that announcement, Clark had provided the White House an estimate of $600 million for the project, with more than half of it coming from taxpayers.

On June 28, Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton of the New York Times reported on a deal from September 2025 in which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump secured from the president of Kazakhstan access to one of the largest untapped reserves of tungsten in the world.

An obscure U.S. company, Kaz Resources, won access to resources of a metal the U.S. needs for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Before the deal went through, officials from the Trump administration advanced applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal funding for the company.

Then an investment firm partly owned by Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric took a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the project, and the investment firm run by Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, Cantor Fitzgerald, helped to raise $210 million for a related entity, likely pocketing millions in fees.

The deal was signed on November 6.

Sonne and Lipton used the Kazakhstan deal to illustrate the self-dealing of the Trumps and Lutnicks, identifying at least fourteen companies with ties to the Trumps and Lutnicks that are working with the federal government on mining deals for materials on which the U.S. depends. The administration has either provided or is considering providing more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer money to those companies.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai denied any impropriety in the dealmaking, saying in a statement: “The only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people. Securing and reshoring America’s critical supply chains has been a top priority for President Trump, and Secretary Lutnick along with the rest of the administration continue to take historic action to safeguard America’s national and economic security.”

The Trumps have also done well over the past 18 months in the cryptocurrency business.

Yesterday a federal filing showed that Trump took in about $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures last year. Bernard Condon of the Associated Press reports that Trump made more than $500 million from the World Liberty Financial venture with his sons and Zach Witkoff, who is the venture’s chief executive officer and the son of Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Much of that money came when an investment fund associated with the leadership of the United Arab Emirates bought almost half of World Liberty Financial.

Trump also made more than $600 million from meme coins stamped with his face.

In office, Trump has pushed policies that help the cryptocurrency industry and avoid regulations.

In her [citation needed] newsletter, financial journalist Molly White noted that “[e]ven the jaw-dropping $1.4 billion figure is only a partial view into Trump’s opaque crypto empire.” She points out that the phrase “value not readily ascertainable” shows up more than 100 times in yesterday’s filing.

Donald Shaw of Sludge, an outlet dedicated to examining special interest spending in politics, reported today that the day before Trump paused his tariffs for 90 days, his investment accounts took advantage of the market lows caused by the tariffs to buy as much as $12.8 million worth of stocks. His announcement of the pause caused a huge spike in stock values, with the S&P jumping nearly 10%, one of the biggest gains in the history of that index. Trump neglected to report the transactions for almost a year past the required deadline, but the penalty for a late filing, Shaw notes, is only $200.

Journalist White notes that Trump is “essentially day trading,” including in companies operating in sectors where “the Trump administration is actively focused on setting policy.” She notes that Trump owns between $12.5 million and $58 million in NVIDIA and between $9.5 million and $46.5 million in Amazon, both companies “whose fortunes rise and fall based on decisions made in the White House.”

Yesterday’s filings also showed that Trump took out a loan for more than $50 million last year, but as Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted, we don’t know why he needed the money, how he used it, what assets he used as collateral, how much he borrowed, or when it’s due.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest…. All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

Using information from Reuters, economic analyst Steve Rattner graphed the gains and losses of the Trump family and investors in crypto ventures. The numbers show the Trumps taking about $2.3 billion in income since the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. The numbers show investors in those ventures losing about the same amount.

Eric Lipton, Andrea Fuller, and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times broke some of the cryptocurrency numbers down, noting that the Trump family structured its crypto ventures so Trump made money on the front end, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction fees, for example. Then, when his coins plummeted in value, the investors who were left holding the bag suffered vast losses.

Cryptocurrency expert Lee Reiners, who used to examine Federal Reserve Banks, told the reporters: “It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters. This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”

On June 23, 2026, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) outlined the “unprecedented corruption of [the] Trump White House” in the first 500 days of the president’s second term. “This is a national crisis,” Murphy said, “and we should start acting like it.”

“The pay-to-play schemes. The pardons for donors. The contracts for friends. The favors for Trump’s children. The use of inside information to make money. This is not a disconnected series of scandals. This is a system.

“Government is supposed to serve us. It is supposed to lower costs, supposed to protect our families, strengthen our schools, make life better for people.

“But Donald Trump believes that government exists to serve him—to make him richer, to protect his friends, to reward his donors.

“That is why he doesn’t have time for you. He doesn’t have time to solve real problems because he’s making money for himself and his friends.

“And he’s betting that the corruption will be so constant that we stop hearing it. That the outrage will just turn into exhaustion, and the exhaustion will just turn into acceptance.

“We can’t let that happen.

“Because once corruption becomes normal, it becomes permanent.

“The White House is not a business opportunity. The presidency is not a license to steal from the American people. The government of the United States doesn’t exist to make Donald Trump rich.

“It belongs to the American people. And after 500 days of corruption, Democrats and Republicans in this body, along with the American people, should start acting like it.”

I remember the Bicentennial minutes on TV (I was at summer camp during the 4th). There was a cartoon in Newsday that was just colonial-themed, Yankee Doodles. Doonesbury did a storyline that took place in 1776.

There were all these touches, both big and small. Of course we knew there were people who wanted to make a buck off the whole thing. But I don't recall ever feeling like the whole thing was one, big cash grab like I do right now. With the president demanding his cut louder than anyone else.

I really, really resent that this was taken from us.

An active‑duty U.S. Air Force major was arrested on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for doing something Congress should have done long ago: demanding real accountability from Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Major Jason Watson arrived in full uniform, stood on the Capitol steps, and quietly held a simple white sign with three black words: “IMPEACH. CONVICT. REMOVE.” He wasn’t shouting, blocking anyone, or threatening violence. He was engaging in a nonviolent, symbolic act of civil disobedience to call out what he described as “innumerable” violations of the Constitution by the Trump‑Vance administration — from illegal military actions to abuses of executive power and attacks on democratic norms.

Standing there, Watson made one core point: military officers swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a president, not to a party, and not to a cult of personality. By risking his career, his pension, and even his freedom, he chose the oath over obedience to a lawless commander‑in‑chief.

Capitol Police quickly moved in, arrested him on the spot, and escorted him away.

This was not a random stunt. Watson’s action was coordinated with democracy advocates and the broader impeachment/removal movement, which argue that Trump and Vance have crossed every constitutional red line imaginable. The message of his three‑word sign is crystal clear: the Constitution already provides the remedy for a corrupt, authoritarian presidency — Congress must impeach, the Senate must convict, and both Trump and Vance must be removed from office before the damage becomes irreversible.

“IMPEACH, CONVICT, REMOVE” is not a slogan — it’s the constitutional path out of authoritarianism.

Major Watson’s arrest should be a national wake‑up call.

As we approach July 4th and the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I have to admit that I’m not thinking about democracy per se.

That may sound like blasphemy. After all, the United States is one of the longest-running continuous democracies in the world.

However, what’s on my mind today are tyranny and socialism.

These are the ideas that, to me, best highlight where we are as a country as we enter our semiquincentennial.

This week offered two stories that, taken together, reveal something deeper about the American political moment.

The first concerns power concentrated at the very top.

Donald Trump’s admission that his family benefits from insider information when conducting business around the world followed a Wall Street Journal editorial criticizing the Trump family for “cashing in on the presidency.” According to Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure, he brought in roughly $2 billion last year alone while serving as president.

Americans consistently tell pollsters they don’t think they’re getting ahead financially. President Trump and his family appear to be doing just fine.

I’m thinking about tyranny because Trump and his family are using the presidency not only to get rich, but to wield unprecedented power.

We don’t have time to examine every instance in which his administration has tried to build a unified executive—one not meaningfully checked by either the judiciary or Congress. We’ve discussed extensively the ambitions of Project 2025 and related efforts to create a presidency with almost unfettered authority over the federal government.

This is not what the founders envisioned.

They envisioned checks and balances. They envisioned the separation of church and state. They envisioned a country without kings.

That brings me to the second story.

Another Democratic Socialist won a primary this week—not in New York, Seattle, or Los Angeles, but in Colorado.

Melat Kiros, an Ethiopian immigrant and refugee, defeated a fifteen-term incumbent. If current trends hold, she will become the eighth member of the Democratic Socialists of America serving in Congress.

Predictably, her victory has triggered panic—not only among centrist Democrats, but across conservative media.

At the same time, polling suggests that more than half of Americans under thirty now say moving toward socialism is a good thing.

Paul Krugman offered what I think is one of the clearest explanations for why.

Young people may be more receptive to the word “socialism,” but largely because conservatives have spent decades using the word to describe policies that have little to do with actual socialism.

Strictly speaking, socialism means government ownership of the means of production—the airlines, the auto industry, energy, and much else besides.

That is not what most Americans want.

Nor is it what most people mean when they say they have favorable views of socialism.

As Krugman argues, very few Americans—including politicians who identify as democratic socialists—are actually advocating traditional socialism.

What many Americans support is something much closer to what Europeans call social democracy: a mostly market-driven economy where people can become wealthy, but one in which progressive taxation, regulations, and a strong social safety net prevent extreme inequality and protect ordinary people from exploitation.

In other words, a democracy where it is possible to become rich through capitalism, but where there are guardrails.

Guardrails that make sure we don’t produce trillionaires.

Guardrails that make sure everyone has access to health care.

Guardrails that prevent the wealthy few from exploiting everyone else—including, for example, a first family leveraging the presidency and insider information to generate billions of dollars.

Throughout American history, there has been a sustained effort to portray anything resembling social democracy as socialism.

Socialism has long functioned as America’s political bogeyman.

There are good historical reasons people react strongly to the word, particularly given the tragedies associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes.

But when over half of Americans under thirty express favorable views toward socialism, it seems highly unlikely they are calling for government ownership of the economy.

Krugman again puts it well:

Most voters don’t think about politics in ideological terms. They think about kitchen-table issues.

There is widespread frustration with an economy that increasingly serves a tiny class of billionaires and a political system that too often serves those same oligarchs.

When many people say they favor socialism, what they are really saying is that they are angry about oligarchy.

They are not demanding a dictatorship of the proletariat.

They are asking for Medicare for All.

They are asking for higher minimum wages.

They are asking for Social Security protections.

They are asking for a social safety net that guarantees dignity for every American.

It’s also worth looking closely at who these democratic socialists are.

Alongside Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib are newer figures like Melat Kiros, Claire Valdez, Darelisa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Chris Rabb.

What stands out isn’t merely their politics.

They are overwhelmingly younger.

Many are people of color.

Several are Jewish.

Others are Christian or Muslim.

Many explicitly describe their political commitments as flowing from their religious convictions.

Their faith teaches them that allowing a tiny group of billionaires to accumulate nearly unlimited power is not merely economically unsustainable.

It is spiritually unjust.

Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions alike contain deep commitments to equality, inclusion, and care for the vulnerable.

That observation brings me back to one of the central conclusions of my book, American Caesar.

For many people—especially Americans under forty—democracy has become an empty signifier.

The word evokes no lived memory of a system that worked well for them.

Instead, democracy often means gridlock.

Corporate money.

Campaign ads.

Corruption.

Stalemate.

What we are witnessing today is a struggle between two competing futures.

On one side stand tyranny, oligarchy, and authoritarianism.

On the other stands an emerging political vision that insists the status quo was failing long before Donald Trump arrived, and that new policies and new ideas are needed to build something different.

That is why I’m not surprised democratic socialism is having a political moment.

Nor am I surprised that so many of the people carrying that vision forward are people of color and people of faith.

On one side stands a version of Christian nationalism historically aligned with concentrated wealth and oligarchic power.

On the other stands a remarkably diverse coalition of religious voices insisting that our vocation is to build a society that belongs to everyone.

As I enter this Fourth of July, I’ll be thinking not only about what the founders hoped to create when they wrote the Constitution.

I’ll be thinking about the dangers posed by corruption, cronyism, and authoritarianism.

But I’ll also be thinking about those who are trying to articulate a genuinely new vision for what America could become.

Brad Onishi wrote:

As I enter this Fourth of July, I’ll be thinking not only about what the founders hoped to create when they wrote the Constitution.

I’ll be thinking about the dangers posed by corruption, cronyism, and authoritarianism.

The capital city is an absolute mess.

The White House is an active construction site, with cement trucks going through the same gates typically used by the president’s armored limousine. There’s a gaping hole where half of the building once stood, a project held up by lawsuits. The South Lawn and the Ellipse, a 52-acre park between the White House and the Washington Monument, are completely torn up. The once-green grass where a temporary arena held a bloody UFC fight last month has turned brown. It looks like a demolition derby took place.

The Reflecting Pool is a murky shade of green, despite a multimillion-dollar renovation to repaint it American-flag blue and mitigate its algae problem. It is now surrounded by fencing and ominous signs that read DANGER EXPLOSIVES and show a bomb being detonated. Ducks that died in the water are being tested.

The National Mall seems to be wrapped in a variety of fencing, some of it in place for construction reasons, some of it to create a security gantlet for the July 4 celebration. At East Potomac Golf Links, at nearby Hains Point, is a massive pile of dirt that some golfers have dubbed “Mount Trump,” taken from the East Wing debris in preparation for a golf-course redo. The Federal Reserve is under construction, as are various roads and bridges, and the Kennedy Center is allegedly in disrepair—and now has an odd contraption of scaffolding and flame-retardant tarps covering its signage at the main entrance like a giant Band-Aid. There are construction cranes, National Guard troops, and portable restrooms everywhere.

Throughout the city, there are government signs proclaiming, We are making DC safe and beautiful. D.C. may be relatively safe, but much of it certainly isn’t beautiful.

Donald Trump has often prided himself on being a builder of grand things. He laid out an expansive vision for Washington, including a gargantuan new triumphal arch in a traffic circle that leads to Arlington National Cemetery. He aggressively took over the 250th celebrations in Washington, redirecting tens of millions of dollars to glam up the tired capital. But so far, he has done more demolition and renovation than construction.

“It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an act of terrorism,” Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me. “If you were just to parachute into Washington, you’d say: Gosh, what happened here?”

Happy birthday, America.

When Trump was getting his start as a developer in New York in the 1980s, his attention to detail could be difficult to manage, Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. He kept tinkering with the design of his apartment, she said, making changes that stretched the patience of the architect. He didn’t like the braille markers in the elevator and wanted them removed from the designs. (They ultimately stayed, she said.)

Plans for the Trump Tower atrium and lobby called for a collection of ficus trees, which Res said were grown in Florida for a year and a half, with an employee dispatched every so often to check on them. Workers constructed a special tunnel to bring the larger ones into the building, in Midtown Manhattan. Once Trump saw how the specially grown trees blocked views in the atrium, leaving those on higher floors unable to see the pink marble floor and indoor waterfall below, he realized that they were a mistake.

“One by one, he made us cut those trees,” Res said. “We begged him, Don’t cut down the last tree.”

Every ficus tree in the atrium was gone, but Trump allowed four to remain in the lobby. Years later, when their leaves eventually fell off, workers attached fake leaves to the real trees. Trump was probably right that cutting down the trees made the atrium look better, Res recalled. “He interfered, is what he did,” she said. “But he let us do our work. He respected us. Now he doesn’t respect anyone.”

In Washington, Trump’s dreams have been slowed by lawsuits. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Birnbaum’s Washington-based nonprofit, has filed a challenge to Trump’s renovations to the Reflecting Pool and joined as a co-plaintiff on suits related to the president’s plans for the Kennedy Center and a “National Garden of American Heroes” in West Potomac Park. Trump’s proposals for a ballroom and an arch also face legal challenges. Some of the suits are aimed at proving that the Trump administration is avoiding the normal review process for federal projects that would reshape the capital landscape in ways that it hasn’t been in decades. Birnbaum said that he has been “gobsmacked” that the careful layout of the city and the legal protections that have been in place for more than a century are being upended.

The desire to give the nation’s capital a fresh look for a big birthday is not unusual: When the United States celebrated its bicentennial, in 1976, the occasion became an accelerant for projects that reshaped the city. But in that case, it was the culmination of planning that had taken years. A reflecting pool in front of the U.S. Capitol building was completed in 1971, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was finished in 1974. The Washington Metro system opened its initial, 4.6-mile line on March 27, 1976. The Constitution Gardens, a 50-acre park along the Mall, was dedicated as a bicentennial tribute in May 1976. The National Air and Space Museum opened to the public that July.

Trump has argued that his projects are an emergency and thus need to bypass certain rules that would typically apply. (“We knew the 250th was coming,” Birnbaum countered dryly. “It didn’t sneak up on us.”) This is how the administration gave no-bid contracts for work on the Reflecting Pool, providing $14.7 million to the contractors that installed sealant that has been peeling away, and another $1.7 million for a “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that is supposed to combat the algae that grew so rapidly in recent weeks.

Trump is thinking like a developer, seeing open space not as part of a design feature but as real estate that he can try to build upon. White House officials disputed the notion that the nation’s capital hasn’t seen improvements and said that Trump has done plenty to spruce it up. They gave me a lengthy list of improvements that includes the removal of 154 homeless encampments, the rehabilitation of 1,143 benches, the fixing of 1,695 lights, and the cleaning of 28 statues and 45 monuments and memorials. The administration also boasted of installing 134 “rat-resistant trash cans.”

Trump has been particularly proud of the improvements and repairs to 22 water fountains around the city and to the changes he’s made to the White House complex itself. He paved over the Rose Garden’s central lawn and added patio furniture, installed two 100-foot-tall flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, and repaved the colonnade with black granite (Trump said that he would pay for the repaving himself but has instead billed it to taxpayers, as my colleague Michael Scherer discovered). White House officials told me that the more ambitious projects—the ballroom and the arch—will take longer because of federal reviews and the amount of construction required.

“For the first time in decades, America’s capital has been dramatically transformed thanks to President Trump’s commitment to Making DC Safe and Beautiful Again,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

Trump toured several of his projects on Sunday, looking at Lafayette Park and the restored fountains; going on a motorcade ride through Memorial Circle, where he wants to build the arch; and then inspecting the golf course that he wants to redesign. After his tour, he released a 589-word post on social media saying that progress was being was made throughout the city on statues, monuments, and fountains (“Truly beautiful, even nicer than the day they were built”); the Reflecting Pool (“The criminally made algae is gone”); and Lafayette Park (“Has not looked so good since its inception in 1820!”). “We will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World,” he wrote, saying that work would begin on September 1, although a federal judge has ordered work not to proceed without required approvals and notification.

Don Folden, a 73-year-old, has been stationing himself on the north side of the White House for six years, speaking to tourists through his microphone and trying to convince the crowds to “stop hating each other because you disagree.” But lately, his message has been as much about spreading peace as it has been about handling disappointment. He’s seen one of Washington’s most sought-after photo backgrounds disappear behind fencing and other obstacles. The other day, he shouted: “You came at the wrong time! The other side is closed too!”

The construction has also made the White House, a symbol of American power, seem small. Much of Lafayette Square has been surrounded by fencing for most of the year, with crowds still gathering to get the best possible view they can, though it’s not a good one. “Is that claw thing still here?” one woman wondered aloud during a recent visit, inquiring about the UFC cage that loomed over the White House like a giant spider.

“People are disappointed,” Folden told me. “The one time they come to D.C., and people are surprised to find this. It is discouraging.” He’s hopeful that the end result will be a nicer park. But there have also been security concerns after a series of incidents, and the Secret Service is aiming to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The National Park Service wants to reopen the park by July 4, although it’s unclear whether it will meet the deadline. When I stopped by yesterday morning, the fencing had been opened slightly to make more space for tourists. Behind the fences, the fountains are working and the grass is green, but I watched as a woman extended her selfie stick above to try to get an unobstructed view.

Down by the Potomac River, the Kennedy Center has kept the wrapping over the entrance, where Trump’s name was attached to the marble walls before a judge ordered it removed. A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center would not provide a timeline for when the covering might come down, telling me, “The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” The wrapping also just happens to restrict viewers from seeing that Trump’s name is no longer there. The grand entrance to the building now identifies it as: THE JOHN F. … ORMING ARTS. It’s like an exhibit by Christo, only with scaffolding instead of polypropylene fabric.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser described the state of the National Mall as “different” from anything she has seen over her years living in the city, but, she added, “I’ve also never been alive for the 250th anniversary.” On Monday, she urged residents and tourists who want to attend the July 4 celebration to plan ahead and be patient. The forecast is for sweltering temperatures and a possibility of rain. A heavy security presence is expected, and fireworks are not planned to begin until at least 10:30 p.m.—when they will illuminate the not-yet-transformed city below.

A report from a cryptocurrency analytics firm details how those who bought the Trump memecoin have fared, with most retail investors having lost money while sophisticated traders did better.