Donald Trump

The Guardian - On Friday, Trump was addressing religious conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton hotel – his first appearance there since April, when he was rushed off stage after an assassination attempt at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

“I remember this place not so long ago,” he quipped. “Hopefully, we’re going to have a little more pleasant experience.”

Trump hit some familiar themes in his address, defending his war in Iran, making false claims of election rigging and stressing the importance of Republicans retaining control of the House of Representatives and Senate in the November midterms.

He focused on Tuesday’s Democratic primary election results in New York, where three leftwing candidates endorsed by Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who is the city’s first Muslim mayor, upset incumbent or establishment rivals.

The radical left “want to resume the transgender mutilation of children, they want to restart the war on Christians and churches, and as you saw with the communists elected in New York recently … they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” Trump warned.

“Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy. And I’ll be honest – I think I’d be the greatest communist in history.” Mockingly, the president said as a communist he could give free rent, houses and food, but the country would inevitably fail after two or three years. He said: “Everyone will suffer or die. That’s what happens.”

Heather Cox Richardson - Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.

But a report by Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about Trump’s remodeling of the West Colonnade is perhaps an even better representation of the Trump presidency. In March, Trump tore up the light brown Tennessee flagstone that paved the walkway in the West Colonnade that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office and replaced it with polished black African granite carved in Italy. When a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the remodeling, Trump answered: “Paid for by me.”

But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”

Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.

Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.

That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget.