Grudge of the Week—America 250
It is July 3 in the nation’s capital—my home. I just returned from a 4-year-old’s birthday party in the 100 degree-combined heat and humidity. Fighter jets flying solo and in formations of four almost drowned out the birthday song.
Tomorrow is America’s birthday, and it’s a big one. “You don’t look a day over 249!” I’d tell her, but I’d be lying. The U.S. of A. resembles a “grenade” you pick up at a bar on the Jersey Shore circa season 1 of the eponymous television show, long before Vinny acquired an eight-pack and a reactionary attitude toward women and politics.
You can’t put lipstick on a pig, or veneers on a guido, and pretend everything’s fine in Washington, D.C., the scene of the ongoing crime.
Donald Trump is often compared to a mobster. But the Tony Soprano I watched on television cared about animals, if not people. He would weep over the dead ducks in the algae-covered, hydrogen peroxide-poisoned Reflecting Pool.
Crews have finally disassembled the fighting cage constructed on the White House’s South Lawn to celebrate the president’s birthday with a mixed martial arts fight. Read that sentence again. Mad Libs could never.
The Kennedy Center’s main entrance remains under a tarp like a bad comb over to hide the Carrara marble bald spot where a federal judge ordered the removal of bronze letters spelling T-R-U-M-P. The Great American State Fair litters the National Mall with detritus, including an oozing plywood mockup of Trump’s proposed arc. If constructed on Memorial Bridge, it would block the view of the Lincoln Memorial that welcomes drivers and runners to Washington from the Virginia side.
Worst of all, National Guard troops wander the city in groups of four. They have little to do besides patrolling Metro stations and policing Black and brown teenagers. ICE raids have disproportionately targeted Mount Pleasant, the historically Latino neighborhood.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers lost their jobs thanks to Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, richer even than Jeff Bezos, the billionaire eviscerating The Washington Post’s newsroom and credibility. By May 2026, the Office of Management and Budget’s most recent monthly data, the federal workforce had ousted 272,283 employees.
One-third of them were Black women. But the Trump administration pulled millions of dollars in affordable housing contracts from groups that mentioned diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These numbers do not add up to the full scope of the losses in Washington, across the country, and around the world. There is no better example than the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
In February 2025, Musk liquidated USAID’s global workforce from 10,000 to 294. Another mom from our D.C. daycare lost her job, tied as it was to a USAID contract. Hundreds of thousands of people died from infectious diseases and malnutrition that USAID programs once prevented, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Heatlh estimated by November.
“Projections suggest that ongoing deep funding cuts—combined with the potential dismantling of the agency—could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years,” according to an article in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.
I arrived in Washington, D.C., for college 22 years ago, and I have lived here full time since graduating in 2008. What a long time to be in one place.
Official Washington gets a bad rap from people outside the Beltway who judge the capital city by the given administration in power. I’m not romanticizing George W. Bush, the softer face of war criminality, or even Barack Obama, who expanded Bush’s drone program. As a reproductive justice journalist, I’ll never forgive the ruling Democrats for negotiating 2010’s Affordable Care Act to be “abortion neutral,” a phrase that really hits in post-Roe America.
Trump’s arrival dampened the city’s atmosphere to an unprecedented degree. His resurrection is bleaker in every way. Armed federal troops are guarding the algae!
The District is resilient. We have one of the country’s most robust abortion funds. (Donate here!) The Free D.C. movement for statehood is inspiring.
But the vibes, I told my friend Kate, who visited last month, are off.
Way off—way worse than under the first Trump administration. And there was an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.
Kate and I took a selfie in front of the moss green slick of the Reflecting Pool. At least we could laugh at the kakistocracy, a word that means a government run by fools. Trump makes everything, even what seem to be the small things, worse. By mid-June, the National Guard deployed to the Reflecting Pool. U.S. Park Police patrolled the area. Trump claimed six people were arrested. We couldn’t even have a good laugh.
We were sitting ducks.
