Washington, D.C
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour Crashes 4th of July in Washington, D.C.: 7 Best Moments
The music icon took the most political trek of her career to the nation’s capital.
Beyoncé wears a cowboy hat, a burgundy faux fur fluff coat on one shoulder and a blue denim shirt during the Louis Vuitton Menswear Spring/Summer 2026 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on June 24, 2025 in Paris, France.
Edward Berthelot/Getty Images
Between a surprise appearance from Jay-Z in Paris, Blue Ivy’s routinely show-stealing “Déjà Vu” dance breaks, and an impromptu mid-air “tippin’ on 44s” moment in Houston, Beyoncé‘s record-smashing Cowboy Carter Tour has been filled with viral moments. Nonetheless, Queen Bey pulled out all the stops for her July 4 show at Maryland’s Northwest Stadium, just outside of Washington, D.C., the U.S. capital.
In its Grammy-winning exploration and illumination of the oft-obfuscated Black roots of American country music (and early rock ‘n’ roll), Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter LP found the music icon squaring her personal catharsis (the album was largely made in response to her negative experience at the 2016 CMA Awards) with a look at how the recording industry mirrors the exploitation and discardment of Black minds and lives in America at large.
On Independence Day, Beyoncé entered the stage with her rousing Cowboy Carter opener, “Ameriican Requiem”; introduced by backup dancers doused in blue, the 35-time Grammy-winner’s vocals reverberated across the stadium. The song, something of a funeral march for an antiquated version of America, set a resiliently optimistic tone for the rest of the night. Between performing the entire Cowboy Carter LP, weaving in classic hits from across her nearly 30-year-strong catalog and incorporating recent hits from Black Southern stars like GloRilla (“TGIF”) and BigXthaPlug (“The Biggest”), Beyoncé crafted a sacred space for Black Americans (and those belonging to the country’s most mistreated groups) to host their own emotionally complex acknowledgement of the nation’s birthday.
Here are the seven best moments of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour on July 4 in Washington, D.C.
-
“My House” 25 Minutes Away From the White House
“My House,” the house-rap track Beyoncé dropped to commemorate Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé hitting theaters, was always destined to be an explosive live performance. From its raucous horns to its frenetic chants, the track was an instant fan favorite for a reason. On July 4, however, there was a certain gravity felt across the stadium when Beyoncé chanted, “Get the f— up out my house!”
After all, Northwest Stadium is just a 25-minute drive from the White House, where the sitting president signed a devastating new bill mere hours earlier. In a country that’s getting increasingly explicit about who it feels belongs, “My House” offered the crowd a moment to flip the narrative and find an outlet for their rage.
-
Beyoncé Opens Show with New American Flag Coat
Fashion has long been a key component of Beyoncé’s stage show — especially after the Renaissance World Tour’s silver theme took over the globe in 2023 — and the Cowboy Carter Tour is no different. Throughout her latest stadium trek, she has debuted a plethora of Western-themed outfits, some of which also nod to the aesthetic of Renaissance, the first LP in her still-unfurling album trilogy.
To open her July 4 show in Washington, D.C., Beyoncé opted for an eye-popping fur coat printed with the design of the American flag over a figure-hugging gray and silver-blue leotard emblazoned with stars. If the coat was a nod to the Cowboy Carter aesthetic, then the leotard nodded to Renaissance — the vibrant Black foundation that America relentlessly attempts to stifle and erase.
-
Queen Bey Goes Full Hendrix
Ever since she kicked off the tour in Los Angeles (April 28), Beyoncé’s otherworldly transition from a vocal interpretation of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” into her own “Freedom” (which soundtracked Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign) has been an interesting point of discussion. While some didn’t understand the choice and others felt it was in poor taste, Beyoncé’s intentions couldn’t have been clearer as she delivered a dirgeful version of America’s anthem on its birthday. Preceded by her own “Ameriican Requiem” and succeeded by her cries of “Freedom, freedom, where are you?”, the opening act of the Cowboy Carter Tour felt especially poignant on July 4.
-
Beyoncé Spots Her Cousin? Sorry, Her Husband
About 15 years ago, Anthony Cosby (hyphen Knowles!) became a BeyHive legend ever since he hilariously proclaimed to be both Beyoncé’s cousin and husband during her I Am.. World Tour. Cosby has popped up at Bey’s tour ever since, including the July 4 Cowboy Carter show, where Beyoncé shouted him out, saying, “C’mon Anthony! I see you, cousin… husband!”
-
Déjà Blue
Already a Grammy winner and box office-topping voice actress in her own right, Blue Ivy Carter needs no introduction. Her Cowboy Carter Tour solos have quickly become the show’s most buzzed-about moments, and not much changed in Maryland on July 4. As Honey Balenciaga closed out her part of the rodeo-ballroom section, tens of thousands of phones rose en masse as Blue Ivy emerged from the stage lift, hitting a nasty slow motion turn into her catwalk and “Déjà Vu” dance break — all while donning a new custom costume, of course!
-
Beyoncé Lincoln Enters the Building
The “Attack of the 400 Foot Cowboy” interlude is one of the better breaks in Beyoncé’s three-hour Cowboy Carter set, thanks to both her globe-trotting, slapstick humor and BigXthaPlug’s wavy “The Biggest.” In the interlude, a 400-foot-tall version of Beyoncé struts around the world and treats various world landmarks — from the Statue of Liberty to the Eiffel Tower — as playthings. Of course, when the Lincoln Memorial winked at her in response to her hat tip, the crowd went absolutely nuts.
Notably, Beyoncé’s exclusive T-shirt for her D.C. stop features a picture of her posing in place of Lincoln on the memorial. Looks like we’re one step closer to that Beyoncé-Oh, Mary! crossover.
-
New ‘Alliigator Tears’ Outfit Deepens Song’s Message
One of the more overlooked songs on Cowboy Carter, “Alliigator Tears” remains one of the album’s strongest tracks over a year after its release. The song explores the toll it takes to transform yourself to fit demands you’ll never meet, set by people who’ll never truly see past their own insincerity and manipulation — and Beyoncé drove that message home with her new costume.
Donning a sparkly, red grown with a thigh-high slit laced with blue frings and white stars, Beyoncé, once again, looked to the American flag to inform her outfit. During this section (which also included gorgeous renditions of “Protector,” “Just for Fun” and “Flamenco”), the costume emphasized the way “Alliigator Tears” illustrates the larger dynamic between Black people and the American project. When she sings, “You say changе religion/ Now, I spend Sundays with you/ Somethin’ ’bout those tears of yours/ How does it feel to be adored,” she’s directly calling out the U.S. for its constantly-shifting goalposts. Whether it’s an effective line of questioning is another conversation, but it certainly packed an emotional punch.
Washington, D.C
Now streaming: ’51st State’ documentary on a young activist’s fight for DC statehood – WTOP News
One of D.C.’s most personal statehood activism stories can now be seen by a larger audience, two years after its premiere.
This page contains a video which is being blocked by your ad blocker.
In order to view the video you must disable your ad blocker.
WETA+ adds ’51st State’ documentary as DC voters choose new leadership
One of D.C.’s most personal statehood activism stories can now be seen by a larger audience, two years after its premiere.
WETA has added the documentary “51st State” to its District Docs collection, now streaming on WETA+. The station has also posted the documentary on its YouTube channel.
Voters in last week’s D.C. Democratic primary selected nominees for mayor and delegate who have vowed to keep up the fight for the District’s autonomy, so it’s a fitting time to revisit the film, which follows a young Washingtonian whose life has been shaped by the fight for representation.
D.C. statehood movement is personal for Jamal Holtz. It started long before he became the face of a movement or the subject of a documentary. It began at home.
“When my mom talked about having lack of access to health insurance and the impacts on me and going to school, that was all rooted in our lack of being a state,” Holtz said. “The fact that we didn’t have a vote on the matter of the Affordable Care Act was to show people that, like, people in D.C. actually experience real issues and real problems.”
“51st State” director Hannah Rosenzweig first met Holtz at a 2021 event in Brooklyn organized by 51 for 51 and New Yorkers for D.C. Statehood. The group pushes for D.C. to become a state with 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60‑vote filibuster threshold.
Rosenzweig said one part of the movement immediately caught her attention.
“I just love the framing of young native Washingtonians,” Rosenzweig said. “Really looking at them as part of a voting rights and civil rights movement.”
She said Holtz stood out from the beginning, saying she knew “he was going places.”
“He’s a leader,” Rosenzweig said. “He’s charismatic — people listen when he talks.”
Filming began in June 2021, when Holtz was 23.
Holtz, who is now 28, said: “You had me when I had braces, to me with facial hair and no braces.”
Serving the community isn’t new to Holtz. He was a member of the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Institute, the city’s long‑running program that trains D.C. teenagers in leadership and public service.
The documentary, which premiered June 16, 2024, at the DC/DOX Film Festival, follows the push for statehood through the House’s passage of H.R. 51, the advocacy campaign in the Senate and the everyday life of a fourth‑generation Washingtonian.
“It talks about D.C. statehood through a different lens,” Holtz said. “What does lack of statehood look like in people’s day‑to‑day lives?”
Rosenzweig said she wanted viewers to see the real Washington — the neighborhoods and the families who rarely appear in national conversations about the city.
“There’s a culture of D.C. that most people don’t know about,” she said. “I love that. In fact, I wanted to move there.”
Holtz spoke to WTOP outside the Wilson Building by the Marion Barry statue, and was asked where he saw himself in 20 years.
“I’ll be standing on the grounds of the 51st state,” Holtz said. “Helping to govern our state and helping live up to the American dream and democracy that the people of D.C. want.”
When the question turned to which office sounded more fun, governor or senator, Holtz smiled and said, “The title will figure it out.”
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
© 2026 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is set to be drained again after Donald Trump said on Monday – without providing proof – that five people were arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation in connection to the algae blooms and peeling paint that appeared weeks after his ill-fated $14m renovation attempt.
“It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it. They went in there with a knife,” Trump told reporters, describing what he first said was a 290- to 300ft slit in the paint but then later amended to a 350ft slit. He also said someone had put fertilizer into the water, which caused the algae to grow.
Reporters who visited the pool on Sunday could see no evidence of such damage, the Washington Post reported.
The newspaper also interviewed three-time Olympic cyclist David Hearn, who said he had been arrested by US park police on a misdemeanor charge after stopping by the refurbished pool and, out of curiosity, touching one of the pieces of peeling paint liner.
Trump has sought to turn the monument “American flag blue” in time for the for the country’s 250th birthday, which included painting the bottom of the pool a dark shade of navy officially called “Old Glory Blue”.
He awarded a no-bid contract to a company he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs, and within days of the completion of the work, the water started to appear green from algae plaguing the standing water and the coating of paint applied during the renovation also started to detach.
On Monday, Trump was adamant it was not the pool company to blame for the algae blooms and peeling paint, but “vandals”. When pushed to provide evidence of his claims, he told reporters to call the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. Neither agency responded immediately to a request for comment, nor did the US park police.
When asked how alleged vandals were able to get so close to one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic attractions, where there is a heavy police presence, Trump responded that “we didn’t have a lot” of police then.
“Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he asked.
It’s unclear when the pool will be drained, but a spokesperson with the DC Water Authority said the agency has issued the national parks service a temporary permit to discharge water into a sewer that flows into a local treatment facility. The permit was issued 16 June and expires 2 July, the spokesperson said.
Trump had earlier posted on social media that “there is a 10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!”
Destruction of federal property can carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Sign up for the Planet Money newsletter. The world is confusing. Economics can help.
Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S. history, has died. Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100.
Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s. At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman’s every word.
His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later.
Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as “Fedspeak.”
Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets.
A notorious exception came in 1996, when Greenspan seemed to suggest that stock prices might be getting ahead of themselves.
“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset prices,” he asked during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The warning that exuberant investors might not be quite rational sent temporary shivers through global stock markets. But Greenspan’s own stock continued to climb.
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan dabbled in jazz
He was married to NBC news anchor Andrea Mitchell, who anounced his death in a statement, and the two made a somewhat unlikely power couple. Comedian Jay Leno once joked during a White House Correspondents Association dinner that Mitchell, not then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, was married to “the most powerful man in the world.”
Greenspan was a talented jazz musician who studied clarinet and saxophone at Juilliard. But it was economics that made him a rock star and a symbol of the widely-shared prosperity at the end of the 20th century.
A master of monetary policy, Greenspan led the central bank under four different presidents, beginning in 1987.
Much of his tenure was marked by falling unemployment. Traditionally, central bankers respond to low unemployment by raising interest rates to ward off inflation. But Greenspan broke with that tradition and kept borrowing costs low.
“He was willing to watch and wait as the unemployment rate drifted lower and lower and lower and lower, and we still had no inflation,” recalled Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who served under Greenspan on the Fed’s governing board.
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan oversaw an economic boom
Greenspan’s gamble with low rates paid off, and the economy kept booming for a decade, although critics argue his easy-money policies also helped inflate the dot-com bubble and later fueled the subprime mortgage meltdown.
In addition to low interest rates, Greenspan pursued a light touch on regulation, refusing to use the Fed’s powers to crack down on risky lending. His libertarian philosophy was shaped in part by the novelist Ayn Rand.
Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, contributing chapters to her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. When Greenspan joined the Ford administration as an economic adviser, Rand attended his swearing-in ceremony.
“Greenspan said that Ayn Rand put the moral foundation under capitalism for him,” said Rand’s biographer, Anne Heller.
Greenspan believed bankers didn’t need heavy-handed regulation because their own self-interest would prevent them from taking undue risks. Only after risky banking helped trigger the global financial crisis in 2008 — two years after he left the Fed — would Greenspan sheepishly admit that he’d been wrong.
“I was shocked because I had going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well,” Greenspan told a congressional committee investigating the financial meltdown.
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan long advocated for a light regulatory touch
The idea that bankers will sometimes take dangerous risks if they’re allowed to should not have come as a surprise to Greenspan, however.
Decades earlier, he’d played a bit part in the savings-and-loan crisis, which was a kind of dress rehearsal for the 2008 financial crisis.
As a private economist in the 1980s, Greenspan provided a testimonial for what he called “seasoned and expert” management at Lincoln Savings and Loan, in an effort to ward of regulation of the thrift.
Lincoln later collapsed, costing taxpayers billions. And its boss, Charles Keating, went to prison for fraud.
Economist Vincent Reinhart said it took courage for Greenspan to acknowledge, however belatedly, that self-interest is not always enough to protect taxpayers and investors from the risky behavior of bankers.
“For Alan Greenspan to say, ‘Well, maybe markets don’t always get it right,’ is a reflection on his entire career, not just his tenure at the Fed,” Reinhart said.
Ultimately, Greenspan’s will be remembered as both a maestro of monetary policy and a reluctant regulator. His legacy is shaped by the boom he fostered, and by the bust he failed to prevent.
John Ydstie contributed to this report.
-
Detroit, MI6 minutes agoPolice investigation at Monica and Clarita streets in Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA18 minutes agoWhere to watch Athletics vs San Francisco Giants: TV channel, start time, streaming for June 23
-
Dallas, TX21 minutes agoDallas Man Convicted of Distributing Fentanyl
-
Miami, FL26 minutes agoFiery, fatal crash shuts down southbound lanes of Don Shula Expressway in southwest Miami-Dade
-
Boston, MA33 minutes agoEditorial: With Boston’s World Cup win, could we host Olympics?
-
Denver, CO41 minutes agoWhen falling housing prices are good news — and when they’re not
-
Seattle, WA48 minutes agoStorm edged by Dallas Wings 112-110 in overtime heartbreaker
-
San Diego, CA51 minutes agoWho’s playing in the World Cup today? TV schedule for June 23
