Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French-born engineer hired by George Washington to lay out the new American capital, proposed an ambitious idea: the whole city as a work of civic art. His vision, visible in the city today, included sweeping sightlines to the Capitol and subtle nods to the new democracy encoded in the street network.

And for much of the city’s history, that idea has been deliberately tended — a new monument here, an expanded park there, a solemn vista aligned just so. Washington is unlike any other city in America for this accumulation of carefully arranged details, many quietly referencing one another.

President Trump returned in his second term eager to leave his own mark on the capital at the nation’s 250th anniversary. In this often slow-moving city, his proposals have been urgent, including a ballroom, a triumphal arch, a garden of heroes, a championship golf course, a renovated Kennedy Center and more.

“He might be equated with Jefferson before he’s done in the impact that he had on the city,” said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the president’s appointed chair of the Commission of Fine Arts charged with reviewing many of these plans (Jefferson looked over L’Enfant’s shoulder and steered design competitions for the Capitol and White House). Mr. Trump, he said, could help complete L’Enfant’s plan.

His arch would be the most prominent monument added to the capital in 80 years, his ballroom the greatest change to the White House grounds in at least as long. And his imprint could extend beyond any single construction site, altering faraway views and the framing of iconic sites.

Many historians, architects and planners fear that a president so confident in his own taste could disrupt in months what has been assembled here over two centuries. It’s not that Washington shouldn’t change, they say — rather, that change should be guided with a particular care that no other American city demands.

1791: The L’Enfant Plan

L’Enfant envisioned a city far more extensive than what the new federal government needed in 1791. Even then, he was thinking about how the capital would tell the story of the nation.

Thackara & Vallance engraving of the L’Enfant plan (1792), Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division

L’Enfant sparred with the city’s commissioners and was fired before finishing the job. But the capital that rose here largely followed his plan, and the ideas he embedded in it give Washington its distinctive feel today. Manhattan’s street grid, laid out two decades later, was divided into uniform blocks that could be easily developed by private citizens. Washington’s shape, by contrast, is defined by what’s public: the key civic buildings, the wide avenues and squares, the central Mall.

“There’s a fundamental idea that the city conveys about public value being first and foremost over private interest,” said Thomas Luebke, the longtime secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which was created by Congress in 1910 to help shepherd the city’s evolution. “That idea that we come first as a group is somehow conveyed in the scale and design of the city.”

L’Enfant’s grand pedestrian mall, the centerpiece of his plan, became a jumble of buildings and disconnected gardens in the 19th century. The agriculture department ran experimental crop fields there. A railroad terminal was built on the Mall in the 1870s, its train tracks bisecting the green.

A monument to Washington was at last completed in 1884, although in slightly the wrong spot, off-center to L’Enfant’s axes (where the land could better support a giant obelisk).

By the turn of the 20th century, as the city was celebrating the centennial of the federal government’s relocation here, Washington’s core hardly resembled how Americans know it today. That transformation would happen thanks to the second great plan for the city.

1901: The McMillan Plan

The Senate Park Commission, proposed by Senator James McMillan of Michigan, was tasked in 1901 with unifying a new network of outlying parks and restoring L’Enfant’s idea of the capital as a coherent whole.

The commission, including the architect Daniel Burnham and the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., claimed to study every part of the city. And in unveiling their proposal for its future, they warned, “No such undertaking should be allowed to invade, to mutilate or to mar the symmetry, simplicity and dignity of the one great composition” of the District of Columbia.

To dramatize its Mall plan, the commission exhibited this rendering in pencil, ink and watercolor wash. It’s more than nine feet wide.

To appreciate its details, let’s turn it on its side and look closer:

At the center of this kite shape, the commission proposed a circular pool and garden, which were never built. But much of the rest of the plan was: Union Station, the Lincoln Memorial, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the Jefferson Memorial, the decluttered Mall framed by American elm trees and grand civic buildings.

Those changes would take decades. As late as the 1930s, the Mall still looked like this, with temporary World War I-era buildings and even a power plant:

Elsewhere in the city, parts of the McMillan plan and L’Enfant’s street grid were disrupted by urban renewal and highway construction. But the “monumental core” evolved into a place that is remarkably faithful to these two documents.

The tilted Mall is the kind of conscientious detail that now appears throughout the area. The monuments directly speak to one another. They each defer to the Washington Monument. The spaces left open are a part of the effect.

The more recent museums added to the Mall hardly match one another in architectural style or material. But they are unified in how they open onto a shared front lawn, and in how their similar heights convey that no one institution looms greater than the others.

“Even in the most extreme of their differences, they’re tipping their hat to the context,” said Elizabeth K. Meyer, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and a member of the Commission of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2020.

In the resulting collection, much of the American story is right there on the Mall: art, war, ingenuity, protest, space exploration, the founding fathers, the great outdoors, the democratic ideal. The Mall has made space for parts of the story L’Enfant and McMillan didn’t anticipate (or celebrate), like Native American history. It has allowed new stories layered on top of earlier ones, like the way the Lincoln Memorial has become a civil rights symbol.

“It’s really unparalleled where you have a single idea that lies dormant for the most part for a century,” said Richard Longstreth, an architectural historian, of the L’Enfant plan. “Then in revised form — and aggrandized form — it slowly and with great effort takes shape as the McMillan plan, which is still the guidepost for our thinking. Until now.”

2026: The Trump era

President Trump returned to Washington with a distinctly different perspective from the architects, planners and preservationists who have shaped the capital. The president is a developer — and he describes his projects in the builder’s logic of underutilized land and maximized value. In West Potomac Park, his chosen spot for his garden of heroes, he sees a “totally BARREN field of Prime Waterfront Real Estate.”

And he believes he has found many such spaces in D.C.

Critics argue that these projects are in tension with the history around them, rather than at one with the “great composition” of the capital. And they say there hasn’t been much time or willingness to resolve that tension (a process that previously controversial projects still went through).

“The dilemma we have is we have a developer-in-chief who is object-oriented,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, who leads The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which has sued over the reflecting pool and the Kennedy Center. That means the president is attuned to paint colors and column styles, he said, not symbolic axes and century-old city plans.

Mr. Trump’s supporters, in response, stake a claim to history, too. Presidents have talked about wanting a ballroom for 150 years, administration officials say. And the 1924 Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission, they note, originally called for a pair of 166-foot-tall columns in the park at the bridge’s western end. The arch’s 166-foot height (below the gilded statues that bring it to 250 feet) is meant to nod to that proposal.

“The president is not talking about steamrolling D.C. and putting up high-rises, he’s talking about additions with a history,” said Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and the chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, which also reviews these proposals. “The ballroom, the arch, putting a monument in Memorial Circle — these are old ideas.”

Being a developer, he added, means Mr. Trump can finally bring those ideas to life “not at the speed of government.”

Mr. Cook, the chair of the Commission of Fine Arts, says L’Enfant always intended for the capital to include something like grand arches (Mr. Cook has for years been proposing where to put them). They’re not explicit on L’Enfant’s drawings. But Mr. Cook believes it would have been heresy for him not to complete his plan with such gateways to the city.

“Then let’s have a conversation,” said Rebecca Miller, the executive director of the DC Preservation League (they’re suing over the golf course, the Kennedy Center and Trump’s plans to paint the granite exterior of the Eisenhower building white).

Let historians debate Mr. Cook’s claim, and include the public, she said. Would L’Enfant’s arches have been 250 feet tall? Is “triumphal” the right tone for the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery? Is an arch the best way to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary?

That is the kind of raucous, public, potentially years-long process that has preceded other major additions to the capital. But just months after it was introduced, the arch has already been approved by the arts commission. The ballroom is already under construction. The president has his own deadlines — the 250th anniversary this summer, and then the end of his term.

Before Mr. Cook’s commission approved the arch in May, the panel asked the architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau to consider removing the gilded statues on top and to add more openings to make it a less imposing mass.

The president, Mr. Charbonneau explained, elected not to adopt those revisions.

A top Alaska election official booted a same-name Republican challenger to Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, from the primary ballot Monday, ruling the campaign appeared designed to confuse voters. 

Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher disqualified Dan J. Sullivan from the state’s hotly-contested Senate race over concerns that his candidacy was “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality,” in a letter published Monday.

Dan J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher who filed as a Republican Senate candidate despite having no prior affiliation with the GOP, can appeal the ruling, Beecher wrote. 

The letter caps weeks of outrage from the GOP, who argued the political newcomer’s entry into the race just days before the filing deadline was a covert attempt by Democrats to recruit a “sham” candidate into the race to confuse voters.

GOP FIGHTS TO STOP MULTIPLE DAN SULLIVANS FROM APPEARING ON ALASKA BALLOT, CALLS CANDIDACY A ‘SHAM’

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, if Dan J. Sullivan had been allowed to remain on the August primary ballot, both he and Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, could have advanced to the general election among the top four vote-getters.

Democrats are eying Alaska as a potential flip opportunity as the party mounts a longshot bid to retake control of the upper chamber during the midterms. The incumbent Sullivan is running for a third Senate term against former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, who was recruited by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., into the battleground contest.

Beecher cited several details about Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign that led to her conclusion that it was not filed in “good-faith.”

The political newcomer requested to appear on the ballot as “Dan Sullivan” despite registering to vote under the name “Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.,” according to the letter. The longshot candidate also attempted to register with the incumbent’s initial on one occasion, according to Beecher’s letter.

“‘S’ is Senator Sullivan’s middle initial, not yours,” Beecher wrote.

The election official also noted that Dan J. Sullivan had not registered as a Republican before launching his Senate campaign and that his new website used a “color scheme and overall theme” similar to the incumbent’s campaign materials. 

Additionally, Beecher discussed Dan J. Sullivan’s connection to Amber Lee, an Alaska Democratic consultant who has previously supported Peltola. Metadata from the campaign’s launch identified the Democratic operative as its author, Fox News Digital previously reported. 

FORMER DEM REP. MARY PELTOLA ANNOUNCES U.S. SENATE RUN: “PUT ALASKA FIRST”

“This consultant’s work on your behalf is, in isolation, innocuous,” Beecher wrote. “Alongside the other facts I have catalogued in this letter, however, it suggests a determined effort and a deliberate attempt to use the similarity of your name to confuse Alaska voters in the upcoming primary election.”

Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incumbent Sullivan previously blasted his same-name challenger as a “far-left liberal” who was complicit in Democrats’ efforts to “rig” the election.

“Is Schumer or Gillibrand and their staffs or the DSCC or the staff at the DSCC — were they aware? Were they coordinating, orchestrating?
I mean, if that’s the case, that would be a huge scandal,” Sullivan told Fox News Digital last week.

Democrats have denied any involvement with Dan J. Sullivan’s campaign. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, took a victory lap after urging Beecher to investigate the same-name challenger’s candidacy.

“Alaskans saw right through Chuck Schumer and Mary Peltola’s tricks to confuse and deceive them with a sham candidate,” NRSC Regional Press Secretary Nick Puglia said in a statement. “Nobody delivers for Alaskans like Senator Dan Sullivan, which is why Alaska Last Democrats like Mary Peltola are stooping so low.”

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Dan J. Sullivans’ attempt to qualify for the primary ballot also sparked sharp criticism from Senate Republicans, who are expected to aggressively campaign to defend Sullivan’s seat.

“Even by Chuck Schumer’s low standards, this was an outrageous attempt to trick Alaska voters and rig the election,” Senate Republican Conference Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Monday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday accused the Justice Department of launching — at President Trump’s request — a baseless and politically-motivated investigation into him and his wife, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

“After calling for my arrest last year, Donald Trump directed his Department of Justice to investigate me,” Newsom said. “And just in the last week, I’ve learned his campaign has reached my own home: to get me, he’s coming after my wife, Jen.”

Newsom adamantly denied any wrongdoing by him or his wife.

The White House declined to respond to Newsom’s allegations that Trump was involved in instigating the probes, referring all questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.

A source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly told The Times that there are two federal probes underway, one related to Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, and one related to Siebel Newsom’s taxes.

The source said both investigations have been ongoing for about a year; were launched by federal prosecutors in Sacramento based on information provided by whistleblowers and other local sources in California; and were not the result of directives out of Washington or the White House.

Lauren Horwood, a spokesperson for the office of U.S. Atty. Eric Grant, a Trump appointee who oversees federal prosecutors in Sacramento, said the office “does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.”

Siebel Newsom, in her own statement, also accused Trump of initiating the investigations.

“There are clearly no boundaries to what Donald Trump will do to get his way or to challenge those who get in his way,” she said. “This is not presidential behavior, and the Governor and I will continue to speak truth to power because the American people deserve so much more.”

Newsom said that in recent days, “federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” and have been “demanding records,” “digging through years and years of random documents” and “abusing the grand jury process” in a quest to find any kind of wrongdoing by him or his wife.

“Not because they found a crime. Because they are simply trying to find one,” he said.

Newsom did not describe the specific nature of the alleged probe, the line of questioning faced by friends and employees or the types of records taken or reviewed by federal investigators.

Newsom’s office said previous allegations of wrongdoing by Newsom in his handling of Activision Blizzard Inc., a video game company that Williamson’s consulting company formerly represented, were baseless and went nowhere, and did not appear to be a focus of the current investigations.

Newsom’s office said the current probes appeared to in part involve Siebel Newsom’s professional and personal affairs, and that donors, business associates and organizations connected to both Newsom and his wife have also been contacted.

It said neither Newsom nor his wife have been subpoenaed, but that they expect to be. It said that they both release annual reports on their income, assets and any gifts they receive.

A longtime documentary film maker, Siebel Newsom in 2011 founded the Representation Project, a nonprofit focused on challenging gender stereotypes. She earned a salary of about $161,000 from the non-profit, according to federal forms filed in 2024.

The non-profit has faced criticism for accepting donations from companies, including Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and AT&T, that are active in state politics and lobby the governor.

The Representation Project paid $161,250 to Girls Club Entertainment LLC in 2024, according to federal forms, which is Siebel Newsom’s film company.

Siebel Newsom is also behind the California Partners Project which champions gender equity, but does not receive a salary for that work, according to federal forms.

Newsom’s office said the governor chose to make a public statement about the investigations Monday because he thought it was important to inform the public directly about what he sees as a Trump-directed attack on him and his wife.

In his video address, Newsom alleged that Trump instigated the probes because Newsom is considering running for president in 2028, and because Trump “hates that I’ve consistently called him out — over and over again — for his lies and deceit.”

“He has turned the levers of government into his own personal power ministries to reward cronies and to try to jail his opponents,” Newsom said.

Newsom cited Justice Department investigations of several other of the president’s political opponents, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey, former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and former vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“One by one, anyone who has challenged Donald Trump has ended up on his hit list,” he said. “And today, I proudly join that list.”

Federal authorities arrested Williamson last year following a three-year-long investigation that began during the Biden administration.

Williamson pleaded guilty to three counts, including lying to authorities, last month. She admitted she lied to FBI agents who interviewed her about her role in the state’s handling of alleged sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard Inc., which she had represented as a consultant before joining Newsom’s office as chief of staff.

Williamson’s attorney, McGregor Scott, a former U.S. attorney in Sacramento, told The Times that federal authorities had approached
Williamson before her arrest seeking help with an investigation of the governor himself. Scott said it was his belief that investigators were looking into the governor and Activision.

Williamson’s plea agreement stated that she lied to the FBI when she was interviewed about her role in “passing information to former clients and business partners to give them an advantage in litigation against the state.”

The state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing in 2021 sued Activision Blizzard, which distributes video games such as “Call of Duty” and “Candy Crush,” alleging that company officials discriminated against women, paid them less than men and ignored reports of egregious sexual harassment. Activision officials denied the allegations.

The case again drew national attention the next year when the lawyer overseeing the case for the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, Janette Wipper, was fired by the Newsom administration, and her chief deputy resigned and alleged that she was doing so to protest alleged interference of Newsom’s office in the investigation. Newsom’s office denied any interference.

As Newsom noted, the federal investigations into Newsom and his wife mark the latest targeting prominent Democrats since Trump returned to office. Several of the others originated in U.S. attorneys offices controlled by Trump loyalists — and they have had little success in courts.

The Justice Department has lost cases brought against James, Comey and Powell. No charges have been filed against Schiff, despite the president accusing him of committing a crime.

Schiff has denounced Trump for turning the Justice Department into a vehicle for pursuing his personal political vendettas, and on Monday denounced the investigations of Newsom and his wife as more of the same.

“The President’s abuse of the Justice Department continues, with new targets every day,” Schiff posted to X, atop the governor’s video address. “The Governor won’t be silenced. Nor will my Senate colleagues. Nor will I. In the face of vindictive and baseless investigations, we are defiant and unbowed.”

Grant, the federal prosecutor in Sacramento, was first appointed as an interim leader of the office in August by then-Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, after the acting U.S. attorney there, Michele Beckwith, said she was fired for telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.

When Grant’s interim term expired, the district’s judges voted to re-appoint him, a stark difference from how judges have approached other controversial Trump appointees.

Unlike the highly inexperienced federal prosecutors involved in some of the other cases against prominent Democrats, Grant has a decades long career in the department.

In the early 1990s, he worked as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel and then, from 2017 to 2021, as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Environment and Natural Resources Division, where he supervised more than a hundred department litigators. He previously served as a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas during the Supreme Court’s October 1994 term, according to the Justice Department.

In a March interview, Grant — who grew up in Modesto and raised his family in Sacramento County — said it is “a very important principle of all federal prosecutors, and certainly of mine and my office, to prosecute and investigate without fear or favor, and that means without regard to partisan affiliation, without regard to whether the target is rich and powerful, or friend, or a foe of any particular person.”

“So, whatever you read about the rest of the country,” he said, “in the Eastern District of California, that is an important principle to which we adhere, and to which we shall adhere, as long as I hold this office.”