The cranes came on a Tuesday. By Thursday two star-spangled steel arches hung over the South Lawn, over the ground where the East Wing stood until he had it knocked down last fall, and under the arches men in hard hats were bolting a cage to the grass for a UFC fight on June 14, his eightieth birthday, the loud center of the year-long thing called America 250.
Five thousand seats face his windows. The fighters weigh in on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and everyone else gets jumbotron patriotism, fenced into the Ellipse across the street to watch on a screen they could have watched from a couch.
He paved the Rose Garden too. Jackie Kennedy’s roses, the lawn Bunny Mellon laid out in 1962, ripped up and floored in white stone because, he explained, the wet grass kept catching women’s high heels. Flowers to stone. Stone to blood, in two weeks, when the cage opens.
The show keeps shrinking, though. One act at a time, the concert lineup walks off the bill: Young MC, gone, and Bret Michaels, gone, and even Milli Vanilli (can we blame them for chasing a check, since who on earth is filling a stadium for Milli Vanilli) declining now to not-sing for him.
Apparently, the check wasn’t enough.
The Blue Origin rocket came apart on the launchpad yesterday in a ball of fire, the billionaires lifting out for orbit because they have colonized everything down here and can smell what is coming. And he wants his face on a $250 bill, in the slot a country keeps for its dead.
Past the fence, a family runs the numbers again, the premium doubled and the repo notice in the mail and the paycheck spent before the month was, while up at the house the gold goes higher: the rich digging bunkers and pouring monuments to themselves on the same grass, in the same week, that everyone else is sinking under.
The party goes up out front. What rots, rots underneath.
An octagon fools you. It gives the look of room, so a fighter circles and gives ground and trusts the space at his back, and the space betrays him, because eight short walls keep cutting the angle until the man across from him has nowhere left to be chased to. There is a cage going up on the South Lawn. Here is the part worth knowing. It is not new, and it is not foreign. We built it. Trump hung the portrait of the man who built it first behind his own desk, because Andrew Jackson is his favorite president.
In 1835, dairy farmers in Oswego County, New York, pressed a wheel of cheddar that weighed fourteen hundred pounds and sent it to Jackson on a cart pulled by twenty-four horses. It toured New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Then it sat in the White House vestibule and rotted for two years.
On Washington’s birthday, 1837, Jackson threw the doors open and let the public come eat it. A journalist named Benjamin Perley Poore was there. “For hours did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese,” he wrote, “many taking large hunks of it away with them.” The carpet was slippery with cheese. Nothing else was talked about at Washington that day. The whole thing was gone in two hours.
Only a small piece was saved for the President’s use.
The smell stuck. It hung over the house for months, you could catch it for blocks, and the next president banned food from White House receptions to be rid of it. Doors flung wide, floors fouled, the crowd hauling off hunks of a thing that had rotted in the hall since before they were invited. That was the party. Underneath it ran something else.
Washington had no sewer system until 1871. Raw waste pooled into a marsh beside the house, and the water the family inside drank ran seven blocks downhill from a field where the city’s filth was dumped, hauled there each day at government expense. The water bred disease and fouled the well and killed, in all likelihood, three of the four presidents who lived in the house between 1840 and 1850. Harrison, dead a month into the job. Taylor, dead after the cherries and iced milk. Polk, dead three months after he left.
Jackson did one more thing that rhymes with now. There was a national bank then, the one place that set the value of money out of the president’s reach. Jackson wanted it in reach. A president who controls the money can flood the country with it right before an election, hand everyone a good year, and call the boom his own. The bank was built to stop him. So he broke it.
He pulled the government’s cash out, scattered it to banks that owed him. For this, Jackson was the first president ever censured by the Senate. Two years on, the economy he had been propping collapsed into the Panic of 1837. It landed the month the next man took office.
That war is on the calendar again. Trump threatens the Fed and anyone who does not comply; his Justice Department, hunting for a charge, goes rooting for anything it could take to court.
The doors stayed open while Jackson cleared a country out. Picture a Cherokee grandmother on the Georgia road in the snow of 1838, walking because a paper Jackson signed told her to walk, one of four thousand who never reach the barren territory that was to be their new home.
Now pull up the video of a father in a Chicago kitchen, opening his door before light to men in masks who fold him into a van and drive him to a county where he knows no one, because a paper this president signed told them to. Two centuries lie between the grandmother and the father, and the paper is the same paper.
Standing at the fence are the American citizens he is throwing this party for. In April the average American bank savings dropped to the lowest since 2022, low enough that an economist told a reporter he first read the figure as a typo.
Fifty-nine of every hundred adults could not put their hands on a thousand dollars if the car died tomorrow. Forty-two million sit one stalled vote in Congress away from an empty refrigerator. That is the slab the cage is bolted into.
Whatever he spends to fill it, the room will not fill. The acts keep quitting, the rocket would not climb, and at this month’s graduations the seniors booed the famous men who stood up to praise the machines coming for their jobs — one of them called the noise a single flat groan of “this sucks.” He cannot keep talent on the stage or the young quiet in the bleachers, because they have run the same numbers the family at the fence ran, and the gold climbing out front is billed to the going-under out back, and the invoice has come due.
The same trick Jackson pulled with a gargantuan block of cheese, the UFC cage pulls. The chandeliers and the arch and the ballroom bunker are there so your eye climbs, and while it climbs you get distracted from the democracy crumbling, or the maxed card, or get distracted from the fact that the fecal field is still sitting uphill from the well. Poore watched the crowd in 1837 hack the wheel down to rind and carry it home, and on the fourteenth the crowd will fill five thousand seats around a cage on the same lawn.
The fence-line family already ran the numbers — the same ones the seniors, booing their commencement speakers, ran. The new bill, the one waiting on a change in the law, will carry Trump’s face, in the place the Treasury keeps for the dead.
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