For this week’s Letter from Trump’s Washington, Antonia Hitchens is filling in for Susan B. Glasser.

The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge connects two incongruous quadrants of Washington, D.C. On one side, Fort McNair, a military base, where several top Trump Administration officials now live along Generals’ Row, sits blocks from the Navy Yard’s gleaming new development projects: facial bars, rooftop brunches. Fifteen hundred feet or so due east, across the Anacostia River, the poverty rate is double the city’s average. Late last week, a shoeless Florida man scaled his way to the top of the Douglass Bridge and unfurled a long black banner as a symbol of “shame and grief” about the war in Iran and the existential threat of A.I. Police diverted traffic and tried to reach the man by phone to negotiate his descent; he set up a tent on one of the bridge’s towering arches. Fireworks from the Nationals game went off around him. Onlookers gathered to stare up at the solitary man, on his perch above the Anacostia.

He had been on the bridge for three days when, a couple of miles away, Secret Service agents shot and wounded an armed man outside the Washington Monument. A teen-age bystander was hit in the crossfire. At President Trump’s orders, the nearby Reflecting Pool had been drained so that the Park Service could clean out goose-poop stains. Trump was in the East Room of the White House, talking about granite. “I built a lot of swimming pools, hundreds of swimming pools at different times,” he told a group of small-business owners. “So I have some very good contractors. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor, fellas, go take a look at the Reflecting Pool that sits in between Lincoln and Washington, the beautiful—what should be a reflecting pool.’ ” He said that the granite was leaking and needed to be resurfaced. He’d already had his “gold guy” come up to Washington to adorn the Oval Office with various flourishes, and to make gold, cursive signage to label several White House locations: “The Presidential Walk of Fame,” “The Rose Garden.” (Trump paved over the Rose Garden last year to put down a concrete patio.) Now, working with his “pool guy,” he had sandblasted the Reflecting Pool and coated the bottom, which used to be gray, in a color called American Flag Blue. He first teased this change at an event on drug affordability. “They call it a pool, lake, and pond,” he said. “Every day is different, but the word ‘reflecting’ is a good term.”

Few aspects of the President’s job animate him more than his construction sites around Washington. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that when Kevin Cramer, the Republican senator from North Dakota, called Trump to check in on him after the apparent assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the President picked up the phone talking about stonework. “We’re fixing some things up at the White House,” he told Cramer. Pool photos occasionally capture him at one of the windows in the Oval Office, peering at the ballroom being built atop the remnants of the East Wing; he once did this in the middle of a televised meeting. This week, Senate Republicans inserted a billion-dollar earmark for East Wing security “enhancements” into an immigration-enforcement funding bill. In late March, on Air Force One, Trump held up a poster displaying the Corinthian columns he had planned for the ballroom. “This is very important,” he told a group of reporters, “because this is gonna be with us for a long time.” “Trump is not right-wing in the sense of wanting to destroy the left,” a strategist close to the Administration told me. “He wants to build stuff.”

The President has ordered his motorcade around D.C. to do recon for modifications he wants to make to the city. Not long ago, he had piles of construction rubble from the White House dumped onto a historic, public golf course in East Potomac Park. This past weekend, Trump attempted to close the course to begin work on transforming it into a luxury golf club. “He’s this imperial President, but he’s, like, Let’s play it softer,” the strategist said. “It’s about civic projects, having celebrations and spectacle. He’s going to build a huge arch for himself.”

Shortly after the protester hoisted himself onto the bridge, Trump left for a weekend swing through Florida, arriving in the Villages, the largest retirement community in the country. “What’s a more secure place than the Villages?” he asked. He knew that they loved him there. The sea of red hats could’ve been a campaign ad; a fleet of expectant seniors on scooters waited to greet him. At a rally inside a high-school gym, Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” played through the loudspeakers and the scoreboard read “45–47.” With the midterms approaching, Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, had already issued a directive to Trump’s Cabinet to limit international travel and focus on the Administration’s domestic agenda. It was time to pivot to kitchen-table issues, for Trump to sell his supporters on the victories of his Presidency. He did the weave like a college professor who knows a lecture by heart: trans athletes, the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s deficiencies and failures. It was evergreen Trumpism, a vision untouched by the passage of time. A banner strung up behind Trump read “Golden Age for your Golden Years.” There would be no tax on Social Security, and the price of prescription drugs would keep going down. “We have a man here who knows more about Medicaid, Medicare, medical crap than any human being,” Trump said, gesturing to Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “ ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘You work out the details.’ All I want to do is take care of you.”

That evening, Trump posted a photo of himself holding a handful of Uno cards—all “wild”—captioned “I have all the cards.” (The messaging coming from the White House can sometimes be hard to parse; in Uno, having all the cards means that you lose.) Last week, Wiles, usually so reserved in public that Trump calls her the “ice maiden,” launched an X account to, as they say, reach voters where they are. “We are relentlessly focusing on advancing President Trump’s agenda and delivering on promises to the American people. I welcome different viewpoints. Follow along for insights and information,” she wrote. Some commenters complained about Trump’s ballroom and the war in Iran; others asked what had happened to mass deportations and the SAVE Act and jailing political opponents. Meanwhile, in the White House briefing room this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio filled in for Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary now on maternity leave, quoting rap lyrics in response to questions about Iran. (Its leaders, he said, are “insane in the brain” and should “check themselves before they wreck themselves.”) He said that Operation Epic Fury was “over,” and that U.S. warships would start to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, using force if necessary: Operation Project Freedom. Just after Rubio left the podium, Trump undercut the whole thing to say that Project Freedom was on hold—negotiations to end the war that Rubio had said was already over were apparently going well.

On Wednesday, Trump received four fighters in the Oval Office to reveal a new belt made specially for a U.F.C. bout that will be held on the South Lawn next month, on the President’s eightieth birthday. “Here’s a picture,” he said, bringing out renderings of the stage for the fight. “Not bad, right?” He held up a book with the models of the fighting ring. “Our country is invited to this,” he said. “It’s free.” The White House camera zoomed in on the images as he flipped through them. “Never going to happen again, never happened before,” he said, like a carnival barker. “Greatest show on earth at night. That’s all lighting.” The Ellipse will be turned into an event venue that can accommodate up to a hundred thousand people, who can watch the fight on enormous screens. One fighter credited Trump with bringing U.F.C. into the mainstream, back in his pre-Presidential days, when it was hard for them to get arenas. “Nobody believed in us,” the fighter said. “They thought we were just absolute animals. You gave us a chance to fight in your properties.” Trump asked a gaggle of journalists if there were any questions for the fighters. “I’ll bridge this,” a TV reporter said, trying to ask about Iran by asking about fighting. “You’re facing—wait, wait, this will work. You’re facing an opponent right now in Iran that has refused to submit.” Trump cited how well he thought the wartime stock market was doing: “I thought we’d be down maybe twenty per cent, and we’re up.”

The day’s opinion surveys showed him at his lowest popularity ever. Trump often explains away such inconveniences as “fake polls.” I called him to ask about this but got a busy signal. Earlier in the week, his ability to “flex his grip” over the G.O.P., as pundits put it, was still evident: in an Indiana special election, a slate of state lawmakers who had opposed Trump’s redistricting efforts were purged; Trump’s camp had poured millions of dollars into their opponents’ campaigns, a staggering amount for a state legislative primary. When the results came in, James Blair, the White House political director, who is currently on leave to run Trump’s midterm operation, posted a meme from “Gladiator.”

Back in the eighties, Trump called a press conference to implore Palm Beach to move its airport, citing the nuisance caused by flight paths over Mar-a-Lago, which he’d just acquired. (The airport, he said, “shouldn’t be allowed to be there” and ought to relocate to Lantana.) The Good Neighbor Council for Control of Airport Noise was not amenable. On Tuesday, the Palm Beach county commission voted in favor of his latest proposal: a trademark deal. Prototypes of a gold logo for the airport, which would be renamed the Donald J. Trump International, had just been released. The next morning, in rainy Washington, the protester came down from the bridge, descending via an internal ladder in the arch. He was handcuffed as soon as he got into a basket that firefighters held outstretched. ♦