WASHINGTON — As they walked through the bowels of the Kennedy Center, President Donald Trump asked Sen. Lindsey Graham his opinion on something that might mean a lot one day to an audience sitting through three hours of “Les Mis.”
Subscribe to read this story ad-free
Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.
Try out some of the new seats being considered for the building’s renovation, Trump told the South Carolina Republican. Graham obliged, plunking himself down in different chairs and telling Trump which one he liked best.
“He couldn’t make up his mind,” Graham said of the president, recounting a trip to the performing arts center earlier this year.
“I don’t know which one he [ultimately] picked, but only in America would I be picking the seats for the Kennedy Center,” laughed Graham, a Trump ally.
Facing one of the roughest patches of his second term, Trump is devoting outsize energy to giving Washington its biggest face-lift in living memory. He is punctuating his public appearances with long digressions about the ballroom he’s building at the White House, the resurfacing of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, a 250-foot arch he hopes to build near the Lincoln Memorial and fountains that his administration is repairing across the city.
Today he celebrates a birthday and thus joins an 80-or-above age group in which only 6% are employed, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. With no more races to run and the clock ticking on his final term, Trump wants to cement a legacy that includes remaking Washington in keeping with his personal aesthetic, people close to him say.
For a former real estate developer, Trump’s projects are a kind of “therapy,” said Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker.
For him, perhaps, but Republican lawmakers are bristling over Trump’s persistent focus on Washington’s decor when so many Americans are uneasy about the nation’s path.
The war that Trump unleashed in Iran has resulted in 13 American deaths and pushed gas prices over $4 per gallon. In the 100-plus days since the attack, Trump has repeatedly said an end is in sight only for negotiations with the Iranian regime to collapse.
FORSUBSCRIBERS
Are the UFC fights at the White House unprecedented?
01:39
He proclaimed a breakthrough on Saturday, writing on Truth Social that a deal with Iran would be signed on Sunday and that Iran has forsworn any interest in acquiring a nuclear weapon. What a deal ultimately looks like, and whether Iran lives up to it, will be the test.
The stock market is booming and the nation added a robust 172,000 new jobs in May, a sign of economic resilience. Still, inflation that month hit 4.2%, its highest level in three years.
While prices are up, Trump’s approval rating is down. A new NBC News poll released Sunday shows that Trump’s approval rating among registered voters stands at 42%, the lowest of his second term. Only 38% said they believe the nation’s best years lie ahead, compared to 58% who said the country’s best years were behind them — a grim verdict measured against Trump’s Inauguration Day pledge to usher in a “golden age.”
Trump speaks about the renovations with a relish that isn’t so evident when dealing with the job’s weightier responsibilities.
“I don’t define it at all. I don’t think about it. I just do what I have to do,” Trump told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker about the war in Iran. He also said he wasn’t inclined to remove any troops deployed under Operation Epic Fury because, he claimed, it “costs us very little to keep them there. I don’t consider them in danger. We have the best defense anyone’s ever seen.”
A day after the interview was broadcast, Iran downed a U.S. Apache helicopter. The two pilots were rescued.
Last week, asked about rising high prices that frustrate many consumers, Trump replied, “I love the inflation,” going on to predict it would drop once the war ends. But Democrats cast the remark as the glib musings of an out-of-touch president.
Midterm elections are often a referendum on the sitting president, and Trump’s continued focus on construction projects peripheral to peoples’ everyday lives bodes poorly for a Republican Party struggling to hold its thin congressional majorities in the upcoming midterm elections, some lawmakers say.
“He’s not doing enough to show those who voted for him that he’s carrying out the agenda he sold them on,” a Republican House member said. “It’s an angry electorate out here, and time is running short.”
Invoking the Washington boundary line along the Potomac River, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told reporters last week: “Once you get past that river over there, no one gives a rat’s pajamas about the infrastructure in Washington, D.C.”
“He cares about it and that’s fine,” Cramer said of Trump, “but people don’t. And people out in North Dakota don’t. They care about the price of gas.”
For all the difficulties piling up as he reaches his milestone birthday, Trump’s mood seems sanguine, people who’ve talked to him said.
He is more upbeat about the upcoming midterm elections than many of his fellow Republicans in Congress. Trump is coming off a slate of high-profile primary wins where his preferred candidates knocked off incumbent Republicans he viewed as disloyal. Over the past month, Trump-backed candidates defeated Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, as well as Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, each of whom was perceived as hostile to Trump’s MAGA movement.
“He just proved, yet again, that he controls the Republican Party,” said a top Trump political aide, adding that the president is “the king of the party and he knows it.”
“I know there are Republicans worried about the midterms; he is not,” the aide added. “I mean, he wants to win for sure. He just thinks we are going to.”
Trump will celebrate his birthday on his terms, in his fashion, with his people.
“I’ve never looked at Donald Trump as old,” Graham said. “I’ve looked at him as a lot of things, but not old.”
A fan of Ultimate Fighting Championship cage matches, Trump plans to watch a series of fights Sunday night beneath an octagon specially assembled on the White House’s South Lawn.
Recounting a recent conversation with Trump, a Republican fundraiser and longtime Trump ally said the UFC event was “really all he was talking about.”
“It’s not what I was on the phone for,” the person added. “He is very excited about the fight.”
And about Washington’s infrastructure. In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers met with Trump in the Oval Office to talk about housing affordability, a person familiar with the meeting said. Most of the time was spent listening to Trump discuss the construction projects underway, the person said. There were other detours from the housing issue: At one point, Trump was on speakerphone with a golfer as others in the room sat and waited.
“He didn’t seem to be in a bad mood,” the person said. “He just wanted to talk about his arch and golf course projects and the [reflecting] pool and the ballroom.”
“He’s not a stupid man, but he’s obsessed with his building plans.”
Asked for comment, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a prepared statement: “President Trump remains laser-focused on lowering costs for working families, keeping the American people safe, and making this country greater than ever before — including the long-overdue beautification of our nation’s capital. The president has clearly prioritized making homeownership affordable again through executive actions like prohibiting Wall Street firms from buying up single-family homes, cutting costly red tape, and speeding up construction to lower costs.”
Before Trump was president he was a real estate developer, a reality never lost on those in his company. Newt Gingrich, the former House Republican speaker, recalls golfing behind Trump last year at Trump National Golf Club in the northern Virginia suburbs. Gingrich said the group waited at one hole as the president summoned a groundskeeper to talk about the course’s condition.
“They came to a halt and brought over the top groundskeeper because Trump wanted to change something and stood there for five minutes explaining what he wanted changed,” Gingrich said in an interview. “He automatically looks at things and thinks about how to improve them.”
The list of what Trump wants changed is long and growing longer. Since taking office he has demolished the White House East Wing to make room for the ballroom. He installed flag poles on the north and south lawn, paved over the Rose Garden grass, added gold ornamentation to the Oval Office and moved forward with plans to build the arch, modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
In a social media post Friday, Trump posted pictures of the “re-gilding” of outdoor sculptures near the planned site of the new arch.
Earlier this month, he announced plans to build a promenade on the back end of the Lincoln Memorial, extending over the road and out to the banks of the Potomac.
“He was enraged [by] the disrepair of Washington, D.C., the heart of America,” Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a longtime friend of Trump’s, told NBC News. “‘How can I receive the leaders of the world here?’”
“He’s trying to restore the awe and glory of Americana to America, and that’s what he did in the Rose Garden,” Barrack added. “That’s what he’s doing with the ballroom.”
Rare are the Trump appearances where he doesn’t showcase his passion projects. In the span of a few recent days he used computer screens and printouts to illustrate how he’s remaking Washington.
On June 3 he appeared in the Oval Office to sign an executive order and trotted out a poster board comparing the size of the Reflecting Pool to other landmarks, with a caption that read, “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”
The next day he opened an Oval Office announcement on coal with the suggestion we “start where we left off yesterday.”
A laptop set up on the Resolute Desk displayed video of water rushing into the newly refurbished pool. Again, the president held up a poster comparing the pool’s size to skyscrapers.
On June 5, Trump held a roundtable discussion devoted to farming in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where he also highlighted his Washington projects. He held up printouts showing before-and-after images of the Columbus Circle fountain near Union Station. Trump spent about seven minutes of his 45-minute opening remarks on his projects in D.C.
Trump’s imprint on the capital city is unmistakable. Back in December, workers added his name to the Kennedy Center, giving him top billing over the slain president it was meant to honor.
But in nature as in politics, what goes up may well come down. Last month, a federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed, ruling that the governing board had lacked the authority to rename the building. On Saturday, the eve of Trump’s ninth decade of life, construction workers began striking the Trump name from the facade.