U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters about the helipad that is being constructed on the South Lawn, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Over the course of his second term, President Donald Trump has spent huge amounts of time and tax dollars on his Washington D.C. vanity projects, and voters are sick of it. As the New York Times explained on Monday, one group that was vital to his reelection now thinks he’s “gone too far,” and “his obsession with remaking Washington might hurt his party politically.”
According to the Times, as the war has dragged on and the economy has soured, Trump has spent “the bulk of his working hours” fixated on projects like 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, the White House ballroom, the disastrous Reflecting Pool renovation, “assorted gilded gewgaws,” and the Kennedy Center, which he now says he will have destroyed if he doesn’t get his name added to the building. And as the Times notes, “These capital projects could cost well over a billion dollars, at significant taxpayer expense, despite White House claims to the contrary.”
And voters are not happy about it. According to the Times, in a recent poll, voters were asked “whether they thought Trump had gone too far, not far enough, or had been about right when it came to making changes to cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian. Perhaps predictably.” 84 percent of Democrats said he had gone too far, while only 28 percent of Republicans agreed, which is to be expected. But tellingly, among independents, who were essential to Trump’s victory and will play a decisive role in the midterms, 63 percent said Trump had “gone too far.”
What’s more, “Asked whether Trump had gone too far when it came to pursuing his personal business interests while serving as president, 71 percent of independents agreed, as did 91 percent of Democrats and nearly a quarter of Republicans.” Fewer than one-quarter of independents agreed that Trump had placed the good of the country above his personal gain; 82 percent of independents said he hadn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.
“He was re-elected to do four things: bring down inflation, juice the economy, stop illegal immigration and get away from woke culture,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told the Times. Voters are giving him “very poor marks thus far on the first two,” he added. The message: “Voters care a lot more about what happens in their lives than what happens in his life.”
Since reentering office, Trump “has squandered what was always his superpower — people had more trust in him on the economy than they had in him as a person,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, told the Times. In the midterms, he said, Democrats’ core indictment of Republican decision-making is that the party is ignoring voters’ concerns, as exemplified by a president “who knows the price of marble but doesn’t know the price of milk.”