PARKS AND WRECK

Trump’s Staggering Vanity Project Cash Grab Exposed

Leaked records show $423 million routed to the president’s D.C. projects this year.

President Donald Trump is pouring an astonishing $423 million into his crusade to remake the nation’s capital in his own image.

The president, 80, has spent much of his second term rebuilding in D.C., ordering a ballroom at the White House, a South Lawn helipad, a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” and an overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The list goes on—and the National Park Service spreadsheets behind it just revealed the massive dent it’s making in public coffers.

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This year’s allotment for the White House grounds tops $323 million, according to internal Interior Department documents obtained by former CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who now publishes on Substack. Work on the National Mall ahead of America’s 250th birthday drew close to a further $100 million.

The combined $423 million is more than twenty times the $20 million the two sites drew under the Joe Biden administration in 2024. “The National Park Service is being used as a piggy bank for Trump’s vanity projects,” said Tim Whitehouse, who leads the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, 70, has cut millions of dollars in funding for Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Jobs still waiting in the queue include tree work at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, an emergency fix to a wastewater plant at Death Valley National Park, California, and new roofs at Mission San Jose in San Antonio, Texas.

The workforce has thinned, too. Roughly 2,000 employees left the park service in the year to May after DOGE cuts and other reductions, according to the records obtained by MacFarlane. One employee said anonymously that colleagues were being “forced to prioritize Trump’s vanity projects over our own needs.”

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Trump’s building spree gathers pace as his standing with voters collapses. The president sank to 32 percent approval in a Quinnipac poll released last month—the worst showing of his political career, and below even his ratings in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building.

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Sixty-eight percent of voters told that pollster that Trump is not focused enough on the problems facing everyday Americans. His own advisers say he’s in denial, and that he’s fixating on “the hobbies that distract from his terrible polling numbers.”

The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman estimates his construction projects consume about 70 percent of his attention, even as the president insists that voters are disillusioned with the GOP, and that “they’re not angry with me.”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.

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