President Donald Trump was forced to roll out patches of fake grass during this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll to enliven the cement patio he constructed over the Rose Garden lawn.
Photos from Monday’s event show small, rectangular strips placed neatly beneath white benches as children and their parents participated in storytime.
The fake flora was needed after Trump tore out the real grass last year during a Mar-a-Lago-style makeover of the beloved White House Rose Garden, and replaced it with a cement patio, tables, and chairs.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy, with the help of then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, revitalized the White House Rose Garden along the West Wing and converted the lawn into an event space that became a popular site for bill-signing ceremonies, press conferences, award presentations, and formal dinners over the next six decades.
“It has fulfilled John F. Kennedy’s vision of a garden that would endure and whose atmosphere, with the subtlety of its ever-changing patterns, would suggest the ever-changing pattern of history itself,” wrote Rachel Lambert Mellon, the Rose Garden’s designer and a close friend of the Kennedys, in 1983.
Now it’s gone.
In June last year, Trump ordered National Park Service staffers responsible for the upkeep of the White House to begin fitting the patio.
According to the Associated Press at the time, Trump also fitted a pair of “beautiful” flagpoles “paid for by Trump,” who said the space had been crying out for “flagpoles for 200 years.”
He first expressed his desire to remove the lawn and replace it with concrete slabs in February 2025, claiming that women found the grass hard to walk on in heels when it’s wet.
“You know, we use [the Rose Garden] for press conferences, and it doesn’t work because the people fall,” the president told Fox News last year. “The terrain can be wet, and the soft ground can be an issue for some... Women, with the high heels, it just didn’t work.”
It’s not the first redevelopment Trump and his wife have made in the garden of the People’s House.
In the final year of their first stint there, First Lady Melania made changes to the Rose Garden, including installing a limestone border path and removing the Kennedys’ crabapple trees more than a half-century after they were planted.
Back in the White House four years later, Trump added a gold-lettered sign reading “The Rose Garden” above the bushes.
“President Trump continues to implement long-overdue and necessary renovations to beautify the People’s House as we approach our great Nation’s 250th anniversary of independence,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told People last year.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
