Look Upon Trump’s Works, Ye Mighty
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Donald Trump is spending his second term trying to cement his legacy, but he still hasn’t zeroed in on what that should be: Is it his name on monuments? A ballroom decorated in his specific style? Owning Greenland or whatever?
Credit where credit is due, though, he’s already made a mark on the political discourse that will have the staying power of a jagged scar.
Guest: Michael Scherer, staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, this is Rob Gunther. |
| 0:03.7 | I'm a producer here at the show. |
| 0:05.5 | Mary is out today, but she'll be back on Monday. |
| 0:08.2 | In the meantime, you've got me. |
| 0:16.1 | Everybody knows about Trump's ballroom. |
| 0:22.6 | We all saw the bulldozers tear down the east wing of the White House. |
| 0:27.6 | We saw the many renderings of what the new structure is going to look like. |
| 0:31.6 | Each version gets comically bigger, those staircases on the side that I can only imagine were generated by |
| 0:38.2 | chat GPT leading to nowhere. |
| 0:41.7 | This new building might not be legal. |
| 0:43.8 | The demolition of the East Wing was done without any sort of permitting. |
| 0:48.6 | But when we called up Michael Shearer from the Atlantic to talk about Trump's building spree, |
| 0:53.1 | the first thing I wanted to ask him about was the East Potomac Golf Links. |
| 0:58.2 | Well, it's one of the longtime public golf courses in D.C. |
| 1:01.0 | There's a number of public golf courses on federal land or parkland in the D.C. area. |
| 1:06.4 | This one's on what's effectively an island in the Potomac. |
| 1:10.3 | Beautiful place. Great biking paths and things |
| 1:14.0 | like that. And a sleepy golf course. It's a public golf course. My understanding is that it's |
| 1:21.5 | pretty affordable for regular people to go and get 18 holes in, right? Yeah, that's right. And it's |
| 1:27.3 | operated by a not-for-profit, you know, by a charity that doesn't try and make |
| 1:33.7 | money on it that contracts with the National Park Service, which is where the land is. |
| 1:40.1 | Shearer is a chronicler of Trump's second term. |
... |
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