Trump’s efforts to turn DC into a gilded bunker reflect his increased political isolation

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Will Donald Trump put a drone port on every roof in Washington D.C.?

No. But that would be the impression one could get from reading the president’s latest post on his planned “triumphal arch” Sunday morning — that every inch of the nation’s capital is slowly (or not so slowly) becoming a fortress.

In reality, it’s an open question as to whether either the arch or his other beautification-plus-fortification project, the White House ballroom, will ever see the light of day. Beset by lawsuits and lacking formal congressional approval, it’s quite possible both projects could be cancelled by the incoming president in 2029.

Just as likely, if not more, is some combination of Congress and the Pentagon deciding that Arlington National Cemetery is possibly not the most necessary space to install a sniper’s nest.

But Donald Trump is pushing forward full-steam with his latest D.C. renovation project. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump’s dressalike loyalist deputy, announced earlier in September that ground would break on the first construction project related to the arch in the coming weeks. There’s a reason for this: It’s just about the only thing the president can do at this point.

With the war in Iran having gone very sour, the Trump 2.0 White House is at its most isolated.

Trump’s approval ratings have hovered near rock bottom levels in the mid to low 30s for weeks, with polling showing Americans widely against the war and Trump’s own ability to extract the U.S. from another costly conflict. A new poll from Fox News this past week found that a wide majority of Americans do not believe the president’s stated claim that the war was an unavoidable investment required to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Worse, affordability concerns remain top of mind for American voters heading into the midterm elections, less than two months away.

It isn’t just among Republican voters where Trump is isolated. On Capitol Hill, the president is in less good favor with Republicans than ever: Senate leadership still fumes over the utter destruction the president has wreaked across their midterm map as the president has spurred the retirement of one incumbent, forced out another, and made a political environment possibly untenable for several others.

In the House, the president remains extremely close to Mike Johnson, the GOP speaker.

But moderates in purple and purple-red districts like Reps. Mike Lawler, Maria Salazar and Sen. Susan Collins have all found it necessary to run on their own independence from the president in recent weeks, while Trump’s endorsements have once again gone to right-wing firebrands and loyalists who will put MAGA above all else, often at the cost of experienced and scandal-free leadership.

Trump’s frustrations with these dynamics are clearly at an all-time high, and last week he lashed out in his latest attempt to banish his critics from the spotlight, hoping to stem the bleeding of support. CNN, MS Now and Politico found themselves banned from the White House, apparently for the remainder of Trump’s presidency — though the outlets have indicated that legal action to restore their status is likely. The move couldn’t even find support from senior Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, who’ve dealt with Trump’s antics and refusal to accept reality for months.

“I don’t know why he did it,” claimed Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip. He went on to falsely claim that the Biden administration “banned” hundreds of journalists, who failed to renew their press passes, from the White House.

Sen. John Barrasso, Scalise’s counterpart in the upper chamber, repeatedly declined to outright endorse Trump’s decision on NBC’s Meet the Press.

But while the president’s approval ratings are now hovering around what seems to be his floor, the president is choosing to focus on D.C. renovation projects and the handful of other issues firmly within his purview.

He has renewed efforts to close down and refurbish the Kennedy Center amid a fight over adding his name to the building, and other random acts of executive power, too narrow in scope to address the widely-felt economic pain of Americans who once again are watching Washington fiddle while Rome burns around them.

Gas prices are on the rise, past $4 a gallon at the national average and driving prices higher across economic sectors. Other concerns and voter priorities — AI regulation, immigration reform, healthcare policy — it’s all taken a back seat, or worse, been bogged down into the muck of the Senate stalemate swamp by the president’s insistence that every issue take a lower slot on the pecking order than his voter ID push, which just last week sank Washington’s first real attempt at AI legislation — the CLARITY Act.

Trump, when he took office in 2025, was faced with a political reality: two razor-thin majorities in Congress, with a highly-skeptical but also bruised and timid Democratic minority presenting his only path to pass more substantial pieces of legislation.

Instead of embracing that reality, Trump spent the next year and a half cocooning himself inside a bubble of altered expectations, where aides do not bother him with that mathematical fact and his refusal to accept it has pushed him apart from Hill leaders, particularly John Thune in the Senate.

Now, that cocoon of disinformation is affecting another reality: The Iran war.

With almost all dissenters exiled from his administration, Trump has wedged himself firmly into a conflict and its resulting international economic crisis, with no ability to extract himself or bring it to a decisive conclusion.

And with Republicans facing an electoral house fire in the coming weeks, the president is choosing to isolate himself one last time — this time, from the presumption that his party’s imminent drubbing could have anything to do with him.