Matt Yglesias came out with a peculiar take this week: Apparently, Donald Trump is our first urbanist president, based on his upbringing in New York City; the fact that moronic tariffs and the war with Iran are making driving more expensive; and his limited improvements to a few DC parks.
Trump is not an urbanist and is not good at urbanism, and I debated whether to give this absurd premise any more attention than it deserves (I genuinely asked myself if it was a joke, and maybe it is). But Yglesias is not the only one who likes the park fixes, and lots of people listen to him, so regardless, let’s make something super clear.
Urbanism doesn’t mean working fountains and accidental disincentives to drive (the effects of which will likely disappear in time anyway). It does not mean people who like a select few features of cities. It means doing what it takes to make places that are accessible and enjoyable, and that promote a diversity and integration that single-use places can’t.
When Trump’s transportation secretary torpedoesfunding for transit in favor of more highways; when Trump uses a national housing supply bill with actual bipartisan support as a mere prop for his democracy-killing tantrum; when he fires or induces 300,000 federal workers to leave their jobs en masse, drop-kicking a regional urban economy that depends on them overnight; you can see this person does not care about people who live in urban areas, and will enact policies that reflect that disdain.
A city, for Trump, is a stage. The fountains are props and the National Guard troops who occupy DC’s streets are actors, in a big, cruel, tacky show that we’re forced to take part in. For now.
Blocked party
But that’s not all: His team can’t throw a party deserving of a city to save their lives. For all the resources and time and natural national enthusiasm they could benefit from, this month’s National Mall activities aren’t philosophically or physically inviting at all. It’s nightmarishly difficult to navigate anywhere near them. Even if the organizers don’t care about people who aren’t coming in, what about the people who want to attend? But the combination of blocked paths and roads, extremely heavy law enforcement presence, and restrictive “can’t bring anything other than a Ziploc bag” rules are anything but welcoming.
It’s not a coincidence that the Trump-organized festivities this summer are exclusive and uninviting. Take the state fair, or the World Cup viewing zone, which is also billed as part of the “America’s 250th” events organized by the White House. (Last week I myself saw people turned away for carrying small bags, but who got in without getting checked? A guy pulling someone alongside him, shouting “I’m a member of Congress!” at the beleaguered security guards.)
The version of America’s history Trump wants to present this 4th of July is not, indeed, inclusive; it’s whitewashed and hostile to people and stories that don’t center white males as the heroes of every chapter. So it’s no surprise that the events feel like a staged, exclusive manifestation of those dangerous, willfully ignorant narratives.
It’s not impossible for members of the president’s party to grasp this. Here is a Republican who (whatever else he’s done or said, please don’t think I’m celebrating this random person whose tweet I came across) seems to kind of get it. No, it’s not just about bug spray, but it is about whether leaders and organizers care if the events welcome people in or tell them to get lost.
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The Trump-ordered National Guard occupation of the District does daily injury to our urban fabric and how comfortable people can feel in public space, but the jocularly aloof Yglesias (“#resistance”! So cute) suggests it has no negative “concrete impacts”. I could tell you about how my kids’ great-grandparents fled a country where the government used military presence on peaceful residential streets to terrify people: fear is as concrete as anything else a state can do to its people. But everyone knows those stories, though some forget how recent they are.
Let me tell you instead about today: two of my kids’ friends’ parents fear that their Black tweens messing around on the Metro platform, or forgetting their SmarTrip pass on the bus, won’t necessarily look like children to a trained soldier from halfway across the country. So the kids aren’t allowed to take transit alone. That’s not a win for transit or the kids. Who could blame their parents? They can read the messages that Yglesias cannot.
Places reflect our beliefs, even more than policies do
Urbanism is different than just doing glitzy stuff (and really, I have no take on whether Trump is good at throwing fancy activities that a tiny number of rich people enjoy – surprisingly, I am not on the guest list), or even fixing a physical feature or two to look better and add to the fabric of a place.
A good urban place is welcoming for all. You can’t make an intersection safer for some pedestrians without benefiting them all. You can’t make a lively neighborhood from one type of person or housing. You can’t throw a banging block party and turn up your nose at your neighbors from a couple streets down who came by to see what the fuss was about. You can’t have a great city without diversity.
Trump doesn’t care about any of those things. We can see that the results go far beyond our cities.
Top image: President Donald Trump Presents….closed sidewalks, in honor of President Donald Trump. Image by Joe Flood licensed under Creative Commons.
National Guard personnel inspect the exhibits at the Great American State Fair on June 26, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Stringer via Getty Images)
Donald Trump does a lot of weird stuff.
Broadly speaking, he does a lot of unusual stuff. Much of that is shockingly corrupt, like the cryptocurrency scams or having his kids roam the world making various business deals while also serving as key advisors. And a lot of it is menacing and authoritarian, like pardoning the January 6 rioters.
Some of it, though, is just genuinely strange.
He keeps messing around with local affairs here in D.C., for example, often in ways that don’t serve any real ideological purpose or even offer opportunity for corruption. He’s just a guy who, I guess befitting his background as a real estate developer, likes naming things after himself, a kind of egomaniac who’s also interested in questions related to the built environment.
Part of the genuine eccentricity of Trump’s engagement with these local issues is that as someone who lives here, it’s been a real mixed bag on the merits.
To an extent, he’s pulled off what no Democratic Party president could get away with and devoted extra taxpayer resources to civic improvements in the nation’s very blue capital city. He’s also been extraordinarily wasteful and undisciplined and at times appallingly devoted to his own ego.
So as part of our celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, here’s my definitive and extremely objective ranking.
Trying to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center” is genuinely appalling.
I try to be a rational person. I love effective altruism. I think we should assess political leaders primarily through the concrete impact their choices have on the world. What name is on the side of the city’s premier performing-arts center doesn’t “matter.”
But what the fuck?
It’s gauche in general to name things after living people.
You can’t name something after yourself — that’s psychotic.
What’s more, it’s always controversial to rename anything, but I do think we have a clear understanding that if you rename something that is already named for someone, that’s a deliberate act of disrespect.
When Yale decided it didn’t want a college named after John Calhoun anymore, Calhoun College became Grace Hopper College. Like that call or hate it, the point was to cancel John Calhoun. You can’t just call it “Hopper Calhoun College” as a compromise. That’s stupid.
The whole Trump Kennedy Center debacle is so dumb and so egomaniacal that it drives me insane.
This was some outrageous shit Trump pulled that violated all kinds of settled norms. It had extremely predictable consequences for the arts, all of which are Trump’s fault. Sometimes, the Orange Man is just bad.
Shitty, but I get it
Trump’s basic view that there ought to be something in Memorial Circle is clearly correct and, in fact, the original intent was to place large columns there. But the circle (and more notably the bridge that leads into it) was constructed in the 1920s and the columns got canceled to facilitate the then-new technology of airplanes having a safe flight path.
In this case, I’m not left wondering what this moron was thinking.
Every prior president was probably too busy focusing on the important parts of the job to dream up a specific monument for this location. And Trump too should probably be meeting with advisors and talking about the cost of living rather than drawing plans for arches.
I dislike the arch idea in particular because America doesn’t really have the kind of singular imperial military triumph that a triumphal arch traditionally celebrates. Also arches are really Paris’s thing: It’s not just the Arc de Triomphe — they have an entire axis of three monumental arches spanning the city. The United States should have its own thing.
But I get what Trump is doing, conceptually.
Similarly, while you cannot illegally construct a gaudy ballroom with corporate bribe money and then try to use an assassination attempt as political leverage to get Congress to bail you out, the idea of expanding the physical footprint of the White House makes perfect sense.
I don’t have any strong opinions about ballrooms, per se, but I have been in the West Wing several times over the course of my career, and what you have there is a lot of the people doing the most important jobs in the country dealing with cramped working spaces. I was also once invited to a White House social event that they did on the lawn because there wasn’t enough space in the East Wing, and it turned out to be one of those early June D.C. days when it’s 96 degrees and humid and everyone is out there in suits and you’re afraid someone is going to die.
I think the whole situation calls for something in the spirit of I.M. Pei’s famous addition to the Louvre to get a modern office facility on the White House grounds.
The fact that Trump drained the Reflecting Pool, repainted it, and then bragged that he’d solved an algae problem that has plagued the National Park Service for decades only to discover that he actually didn’t solve it at all is not important. But it is a potent metaphor for much of his administration — notably the war with Iran, which played out on a parallel timeline and similarly ended with Trump discovering that he in fact could not secure a better deal than the one the Obama administration had already bequeathed to him.
But in typical Trump fashion, he didn’t just say something like, “I tried but it didn’t work and now the question is whether Congress wants to appropriate money for a very expensive rebuild of the filtration system or if everyone should just learn to live with algae.” He’s gone off on a whole insane binge of lying about the situation, arresting people for touching the water, and so forth. Meanwhile, you have center-right people complaining that the media is too obsessed with the Reflecting Pool when it doesn’t matter. To which I say: Sure. But Trump made a huge deal out of this and now wants to wriggle out of talking about it because it’s an embarrassing failure, which is not only Trump’s approach to Iran but also the whole conservative movement’s approach to Trump!
Fine by me, albeit dumb
As a patriotic Washingtonian and a loyal member of the #resistance, you’re supposed to claim to hate that Trump has deployed uniformed National Guard personnel on the city streets.
The truth is that what Trump is doing here is pretty stupid, but its only concrete impacts are beneficial.
For months now, we’ve had small groups of National Guard members patrolling parts of the city, usually in groups of four or more. They seem to work mostly nine to five and in high-profile areas where they’re likely to be seen. There are a lot around Union Station, a lot on the Mall, and always a few strolling around 14th Street where there are a lot of restaurants. They’re often patrolling near downtown Metro stations. This is just not the tactical deployment pattern you would use if you seriously wanted to fight crime, which would involve sending people to high-crime neighborhoods at night.
What’s more, the Guard can’t really fight crime, because they don’t have any arrest authority.
That being said, despite the lack of arrest authority or appropriate deployment, the Guard has impacted crime in D.C.
Erich Battistin, Richard Hahn, Samantha Pérez-Dávila, and Borui Sun released a report about recent crime declines in Washington and found that the reduction in shootings and murders is due almost entirely to an increase in the intensity of police activity. Cops started making more proactive arrests — narcotics sweeps, traffic stops, warrant enforcement — and this accomplished what good preemptive policing tends to accomplish. People got caught carrying illegal handguns, which led to some bad guys getting locked up and others deciding it was more prudent to leave the guns at home.
I think there’s some reason to believe they could’ve been much more effective at combating serious crime had they been in the right places. But they weren’t. They did reduce crime where they were, though.
Local media coverage of this finding has been quite negative for Trump, highlighting the researchers’ finding that the cost-effectiveness of using the National Guard like this is terrible. Guard troops are much more expensive than regular police officers, but also less effective at fighting crime.
So this is a pretty dumb idea all things considered.
That said, as a D.C. resident, if Trump wants to waste federal dollars on reducing petty theft in my neighborhood, I’m not going to object too strongly.
Good, actually
Last but not least, Trump has seriously spruced up some of the aforementioned National Park Service-run urban parks.
I don’t want to exaggerate this. In typical Trump fashion, rather than taking a comprehensive look at the federal government’s genuinely extensive landholdings in the city, he focused a lot on a handful of fountains that tourists are likely to see.
But the fact that these fountains languished in disrepair for years was a real source of frustration to a lot of people in the city, and a number of friends were quietly asking me at one point if I understood how Trump had managed to finally get the Interior Department to care about this. Speaking as someone who was pretty impressed with Doug Burgum’s tenure as governor of North Dakota, who praised him when he was selected for the cabinet, and who has felt burned by his cartoonish behavior around energy issues since taking office, I was really hoping there was a Burgum Redemption Arc here.
The actual answer here turns out to be more banal.
The Park Service needed extra money to make those repairs, but since D.C. is not represented in Congress, Congress kept failing to appropriate the money.
But the N.P.S. collects fees at many national parks, and that money is used to support repairs, among other things. Traditionally that’s meant cycling the money back into the parks that the fees are collected from. But Trump’s idea was that he could poach fee revenue generated by Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and other popular parks and use some of it to fix up the urban parks here in Washington.
As someone who lives in D.C. and is not really much of an outdoorsman, I strongly endorse this course of action.
I also strongly suspect that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had taken fee revenue away from our patriotic heartland parks and used it to make my neighborhood nicer, they would have ended up impeached. Instead, Republican members of Congress are silent on Trump taking money away from their states to dedicate to local activities in D.C., and there are 10 Democratic senators1 issuing low-key complaints about it.
Fundamentally, though, for all his many flaws, Trump is America’s first urbanist president. He’s a born and raised New Yorker like me, a Knicks fan, a guy who spiked global oil prices for months with his war in Iran, made cars more expensive with tariffs, and fundamentally understands that urban parks are more important than rural recreation.
So as America heads toward the semiquincentennial, I want to thank Trump for that.
The ending is classic Yglesias Sarcasm, which rarely plays well with people who don't read him often. But the rest of the piece is a good dive into the practical nuts and bolts of having a mercurial leader.
Philadelphia-area drivers can now fill up their tanks with less-expensive gasoline promoted by President Donald Trump’s administration, but details on the entire enterprise remain scarce.
The White House on Tuesday announced the opening of the first Freedom Fuel gas station in Upper Dublin Township, at a former Sunoco station.
In the undated video, drivers happily filled their tanks for $3.47 a gallon, which the White House said was to honor “our 47th President.” That’s cheaper than the least-expensive gas at nearby stations, according to prices posted by GasBuddy.
The Freedom Fuel station in Dresher is near a McDonald’s and across the street from a shopping plaza. But what sets it apart from other nearby gas stations is the assortment of American flags planted across its footprint — and the cheaper gas.
While a nearby Citgo station, about five minutes away, prices regular gas at $3.79 a gallon, and a Gulf offers it at $3.85, Freedom Fuel offers it at $3.47 a gallon.
For many patrons stopping by Tuesday afternoon, the branding was new — and secondary to savings.
Jessiah Brice, 25, said the Freedom Fuel station was convenient because it is near her job. She had noticed the new branding after the July Fourth holiday and had no idea what it was about, but she welcomed the idea regardless of the affiliation with Trump.
“Gas should be cheaper,” she said. “My only issue is: How is it $3.47 here and $5 by me?”
Another gas buyer, who declined to give her name out of privacy concerns, said she had heard of Trump’s efforts to bring cheaper gas to people but had not connected it to her local gas station.
“What’s not to love?” said another patron, before driving away with a full tank.
Seyer Hamidi, 36, stumbled upon the station after picking up his car, which he likes to fill up with premium gas, from the mechanic. He, too, welcomed the idea.
“Gas is going to be high whether you’re a Republican or Democrat,” the Republican said, noting the cheaper gas was a step in the right direction.
A lot remains unclear, including the names of the participating businesses and how they are able to sell gasoline cheaper than nearby competitors.
A White House spokesperson confirmed that a website for the Freedom Fuel Network, which showed 25 locations across the Philadelphia region and South Jersey, was accurate. The White House did not confirm that all 25 locations are open and did not provide information about the company.
The list includes stations in Elmwood Park, Bustleton, and Hunting Park, but it was unclear if every location on the Freedom Fuel website was open.
A White House spokesperson said the Freedom Fuel Network was a private company and not a government program, adding that the company was not purchasing gasoline at a discount and that the administration has not provided funding. The spokesperson said the business was simply making gas more affordable for drivers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey but did not elaborate.
The company behind the Freedom Fuel Network did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond that, not much information was available beyond the White House social media post and a statement made by Trump, who wrote on his Truth Social account last week that a “very smart retailer” located throughout the Northeast was “stepping up” to offer a discount at the pump.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, crunched the numbers and said there was no profitable way for Freedom Fuel stations to sell gas so cheaply.
“Stations selling at this price, it’s not sustainable,” De Haan said. “Generally, when losses happen, somebody’s got to pay for it.”
De Haan had no insight on who owns the stations or what deals they might have made to purchase gas, but did confirm many of the stations exist in GasBuddy’s database, though the names were “vastly different.”
Gas prices have been dropping in recent weeks after peaking in May. Prices soared after the United States attacked Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — a key shipping lane — was shut down.
The average cost of a gallon of gas in Philadelphia on Tuesday was $3.95, according to AAA. That was up nearly 20% from this time last year, when the cost of a gallon of gas averaged $3.31.
This map shows how people in the United States identify their ancestry or family origin. Use it to explore the many ways we describe our heritage and ourselves.
How do people here identify?
5,800 people
African American14%
Polish7%
German7%
English7%
Irish7%
Many people in this tract did not identify a specific ancestry, but overall,
38% identified as white and 27% identified as Black.
So many cool fun facts I discovered: 1. The Slovene capital of America is Cleveland, and it's not even close. 2. Looking for Assyrians? Try Chicago. 3. Looking for Carpatho Rusyns? Try Andy Warhol's hometown of Pittsburgh. 4. Looking for Hawaiians outside of Hawaii? Vegas, baby. 5. There's a neighborhood in Alexandria, VA that's 17% Black, 16% Moroccan, 10% Ethiopian, 8% Sudanese, and 5% Aztec 6. There's a neighborhood in St. Paul, MN that's 22% Hmong, 10% Black, 10% Ethiopian, 9% German, and 7% Bhutanese 7. There's a neighborhood in Bethesda, MD that's 21% Nepali, 12% Honduran, 9% Salvadoran, 8% Black, and 6% Vietnamese
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