Warning Shot

Trump's Racist Makeover of Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, DC — I took a walk in the rain this morning through the nation’s capital to take a look at three sites that reflect how Trump is making over the city in his image.

No, I didn’t visit the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool he’s painting blue or the Arlington circle where he plans to build a 250-foot arch, although I did see the gaudy new UFC stadium he’s building on the South Lawn of the White House.

But the purpose of my tour was to witness Trump’s racist installations and de-installations.

First stop, Black Lives Matter Plaza. Or it used to be. In March 2025, DC city workers with jackhammers destroyed it under threat from Donald Trump — just a block away in the White House.

Second stop, Judiciary Square. Home to Confederate General Albert Pike, the only Confederate general with a statue in Washington, DC. Protesters pulled him down in 2020. Trump put him back in October 2025.

Third stop, Freedom Plaza, named to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet Trump just put up a new statue in the plaza to honor a white enslaver named Caesar Rodney. The statue was removed from Delaware during the racial justice uprising in 2020 and brought here last week.

All this is happening in 2026, and it’s not the first time. It happened after Reconstruction when Confederate monuments went up all across the South from the 1890s to the 1920s. Then it happened again during the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s. Every time Black people started making progress, a group of white people came along to send a historically revisionist message: we won, you lost, know your place.

These reinstallations are sending the same racist message — erasing who belongs in public space before they erase who belongs in public life.

The statues are not the point. The statues are the preview.