How Trump Has Already Transformed Washington

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President Donald Trump is transforming Washington, D.C., and the effects are already noticeable.

In front of Washington’s Union Station, a massive, Beaux Arts-style train station that has been the main artery of the city since it opened in 1908, members of the National Guard have in recent days been stationed with massive military vehicles.

Along the columns of the station’s main entrance, where the homeless typically made their permanent home, few of those permanent Union Station residents are to be seen in the early days of Trump’s move to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”

It remains unclear how long Trump’s aggressive crackdown will last, but what’s certain is Trump wants to make good on his campaign promise of transforming the federal district.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the Republican Party adopted, in its platform, making “Washington, D.C., the Safest and Most Beautiful Capital City.”

The city is already changing on the architectural level.

In March, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser removed the Black Lives Matter Plaza installation. This painted street mural stretched across two city blocks in front of the White House, and its 35-foot-tall letters remained there from June 2020, in the final several months of the first Trump administration.

The removal came after Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., introduced a bill to eliminate the plaza, and Bowser stated that the mural “inspired millions of people and helped our city through a painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference.”

Trump clearly cares about what D.C. looks like. He’s moving forward with plans for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom and recently took to social media to extol “what a great beauty” the Executive Office Building is.

The politically motivated vandalism of the 2020 riots is also being undone. In June of that year, protesters toppled and set ablaze a statue of Albert Pike in Washington’s Judiciary Square, who was a general of the Confederate Army and a prominent Freemason.

The National Park Service announced this month it will restore and reinstall the statue in a project that “aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and reinstate preexisting statues.”

The president has taken a keen interest across the board in uncanceling American history, especially in the nation’s capital.

Unprompted, Trump in July urged the owners of the Washington Commanders NFL football team—previously known as the Redskins from 1932 until the racial unrest of 2020—to bring back the old name.

“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them,” Trump wrote on the platform Truth Social. “Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

The next day, he proceeded to threaten to stand in the way of the Commanders’ new Washington, D.C., stadium deal if owners didn’t play ball on restoring the Redskins name.

On a basic cultural level, removed from policy changes, Trump has transformed Washington.

Butterworth’s, a French restaurant on Capitol Hill, has emerged as a major meetup site for Make America Great Again-adjacent figures in Washington.

The cozy cafe has been frequented by Republican figures such as political commentator Steve Bannon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Even liberal-leaning politicos such as Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and former NBC News host Chuck Todd have paid visits.

Down the street from a Heritage Foundation office and across from the influential Conservative Partnership Institute, the restaurant was opened by the editor-in-chief of National Pulse, Raheem Kassam, just weeks before the 2024 election.

An especially high-profile example of Trump’s desire to culturally reorient Washington life is his work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he serves as chairman alongside Richard Grenell, its president.

On Wednesday, Trump announced his picks as this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, including country music great George Strait, disco diva Gloria Gaynor, and actor Sylvester Stallone.

“I would say I was about 98% involved [in picking them],” he said. “They all went through me … . I turned down plenty. I had a couple of wokesters.”