Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has moved aggressively to leave his mark. Many of his most visible legacy projects are not pieces of legislation, though. They’re part of a campaign to reshape Washington, DC, itself. 

Last year, Trump knocked down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his massive new ballroom. He tried renovating the Reflecting Pool, which did not turn out well. He regilded four large statues near the National Mall, paved the White House Rose Garden, and drenched the Oval Office in gold and golden appliqués.

Other Trump plans are still in the works: He’s proposed building a 250-foot triumphal arch in a traffic circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River. He now says the arch would double as a “military complex,” housing drones, snipers, and ammunition.

And, of course, there’s the ongoing fight over the Kennedy Center, which Trump has threatened could be “ripped down” if he doesn’t get his name on the building in some capacity (he already tried once, and was ordered by a court to remove it).

It’s all a lot to keep track of. Luckily, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with New York magazine’s Ben Terris, who recently spent time with Trump touring the ballroom construction site. Terris explains what ties all the disparate projects together and what they reveal about the Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s capital — and his own legacy.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

What is up with Trump’s obsession with physical landmarks? 

Before I even talked to him, I did a lot of reporting about why he seems to be so obsessed with all this stuff. And it’s really like a legacy for him. He’s trying to build something that will last beyond his time here, both his time here in the White House and probably his time here on Earth. He wants to actually have physical monuments to himself. 

Somebody who’s close to him told me that the president doesn’t care that much about legislation. He doesn’t care that much about the kind of nuts and bolts of being a president. He cares a lot about buildings and prizes. If he has buildings and prizes, then he feels like his legacy will go on forever. That’s why he wants the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s building an arch for himself in Washington. It’s really about a legacy that will withstand the test of time in his mind.

Which is to say, he doesn’t really realize that the right legislation could get him more prizes.

Most presidents try to be very successful presidents and have other people build monuments for you. He’s trying to honor himself, basically. It’s something I asked him about actually when I sat down with him in the Oval Office. There was a viral moment a few months ago from Senator Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who may run for president. And he said at a rally that the president is building monuments to himself because he knows that nobody will do it when he’s gone.

I asked the president this because I thought maybe he’d take a shot at Jon Ossoff or deny it, but I was very surprised. He just said, “Yeah, that’s true. Nobody will do it when I’m gone. When I’m gone, nobody will do it.” 

It feels kind of self-aware, surprisingly, of Donald Trump to not take a shot at Jon Ossoff, but to just agree with him and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly my motivation.”

Part of me though — okay, here’s a guy who recognizes that when he’s gone, history may not necessarily look fondly upon him. But also there was a part of me that thought that that’s not actually what he was saying. 

What he was maybe saying is, “I’m the only person in the world capable of building something as beautiful and important as these monuments. I alone can fix it. I alone can build it.” Nobody else has the ability to do this the way that he has. So on the one hand, possibly self-aware that he won’t be recognized the way he wants to be. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a kind of egomaniac talking about how he’s incredible at things and nobody else can do it. I think it’s all kind of tied up in that he’s not the most introspective person I’ve ever talked to, let’s put it that way. 

But even the least introspective person in the world, when he gets to be 80 years old, might start thinking about what’s left of him after he’s gone.

Tell me about the tour President Trump gave you. 

I thought I was going to get 20 minutes with him in the Oval Office. I ended up getting 45 minutes in the Oval Office and then almost a 45-minute tour of the White House grounds. 

He showed me the Rose Garden, where they put statues and they turned it into a kind of paved-over terrace that looks like Mar-a-Lago. He showed me the Presidential Walk of Fame, where they have all the pictures of the presidents and then the autopen for Joe Biden, and a room called the Palm Room where he put down a new marble floor that he was very proud of. 

The helipad was still being constructed. He walked me over there and introduced me to the construction workers as they were building this helipad. And then he took me to the ballroom itself and showed me this behemoth building. 

“Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever.”

There’s steel rising 70 feet in the air. It’s the size of one-and-a-half football fields. He was bragging about how there’s more steel there than in the Washington Commander stadium that’s being built. It’s this enormous thing that you can’t really see anywhere in Washington unless you go up the Washington Monument and look at it from afar. And I was just in the middle of this thing and I couldn’t really believe how huge it was. 

He wanted to show me this is where the entrance is going to be, [where] the chandeliers will be. He told me he could picture it all already because this is, quote, “What I do.” 

He’ll gaze out the window in the morning first thing in the morning from the residence to see the work. He’ll look out the window at night to see the work. He is monitoring this very closely.

One thing that the ballroom especially shares with the Kennedy Center is that it feels like this administration is doing its darnedest to outmaneuver the courts, to get around any legal questions concerning the work. Did that come up at all while he was giving you this tour?

When I was getting the tour, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that they could keep going. There was a kind of pause on their ruling where they were allowed to keep doing construction while the Supreme Court figured out how they were going to rule on it. And so clearly they were racing against the Supreme Court to get as much done as possible. They really wanted to become like a fait accompli. They wanted it to look like the whole thing was done. It was beyond going back. 

I was asking the president, “Are you worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule that you can’t keep doing construction unless you get permission from Congress?” Congress does have the right to decide what happens to federal buildings, so it would make sense that they would be able to make a decision on this. And he said he wasn’t worried about it at all. He said, “the Supreme Court’s going to make the right decision. The people want this.”

He’s like, “If I needed to get Congress’s approval, I could do it, but it’s not going to happen.” And he ended up being right. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval. The Supreme Court’s letting him do it.

But Congress may get shaken up in about a month and a half. Is that on his radar?

Yes, and certainly Democrats are aware. I talked to a bunch of Democrats for this story mostly about what happens next. Are they going to start investigating the ballroom? Are they going to start looking at subpoenaing donors and looking at the contracts and figuring out if there’s a pay-to-play scheme, if there was illegal construction happening? And Democrats are champing at the bit for that. 

They’re calling it a target-rich environment. They’re ready to get subpoena power. And they’re also talking about in 2028, what do we do if we get the White House ourselves? Will we tear this down? 

[Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] says she wants to turn it into a soup kitchen. There are all sorts of ideas for it. I asked the president about that too. I said, “Are you worried that Democrats will get the White House in 2028 and they come and they tear down this ballroom right after you built it?” And he basically said, “I’d like to see them try.” 

He said, “We’re building this ballroom with nuclear concrete.” That’s what he called it, nuclear concrete, concrete that can withstand a nuclear blast. He’s like, “If it can withstand a nuclear blast, I’d like to see Democrats try to take it down.” 

He told me somebody could go to the ballroom with a jackhammer and spend two days straight jackhammering one column and it wouldn’t even leave a mark. And so he’s basically daring them to try to tear it down because he’s building something that he feels like can withstand a nuclear blast so it can withstand Democrats.

At the end of the day, all of this is just about his legacy. That’s what you learned by hanging out with him and talking to him about it. Do you think by spreading his efforts across DC, he’s ensuring that at least something stands and that his legacy is ultimately secured? 

He definitely thinks that these buildings can withstand more than anything else. Legislation can be rolled back, executive orders can be reversed. This is something that he feels like can last forever. 

I do think there’s a world in which Democrats tear down some of the stuff. The arch is a good example. I mean, the ballroom is hard to tear down, right? First of all, it’s super expensive. It’s huge. It also has to be replaced with something. You can’t just tear it down and then leave a hole in the ground. You have to then build another ballroom, which would be kind of a crazy thing to do and take all this time and then become another story about how Democrats are spending all their time building a ballroom. 

Is it possible? Sure. It just seems a little bit harder to imagine, but the arch, you could see that thing getting dynamited on some Fourth of July and then just leaving it as a traffic circle. So I could see a world in which maybe some of these things get destroyed in a kind of, I don’t know, epic fashion. Why not?

It feels like he might be onto something, which is that it would be very controversial to just tear something down for the sake of it out of spite.

Absolutely.

There’s also two years left in his term. Do you get the sense that this is slowing down or ramping up?

It’s hard to say. I have a hard time believing it’s going to end, especially if he becomes a lame-duck president and there’s even fewer things he can do legislatively.

Why not just keep building things and putting your name on things because there’s nothing else to do with your time? 

He said that in the first term, the reason he didn’t do a lot of this stuff is because he was too under siege, that it was a difficult time to build a ballroom because of the Russian investigations or the impeachment trials and stuff like that.

Maybe he gets tied up in all that same kind of stuff if Democrats take charge, but I also feel like he’ll have an easier time just trying to ignore subpoenas. It’s going to be a really messy time. And so maybe he’ll just hole himself off into a room somewhere designing more buildings, because what else is he going to do?

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Four beluga whales have died in a month at one of America’s top-rated aquariums — a tragic development and, arguably, a reason to revisit the ethics of zoos. (More on that in just a minute.)

The latest cetacean casualty, a 26-year-old female named Osiris, died at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium yesterday. She follows 34-year-old Beethoven, a longtime resident of the aquarium, as well as 20-year-old Rain and 23-year-old Peekachu, who died in late August and early September.   

Osiris, Rain and Peekachu were all part of the Marineland diaspora: a group of four dolphins and 30 beluga whales that rescuers have worked to relocate since the 2024 closure of a scandal-plagued theme park in Niagara Falls, Canada. This summer, the animals were successfully transferred to aquariums and marine parks in the US and Spain. That was a frankly incredible undertaking involving padded shipping containers, a police-escorted convoy and a chartered plane. 

But in some regards, the international flight wasn’t even the hardest part of the whales’ journeys. Some of the animals have struggled to thrive in their new environments — even when those environments are state-of-the-art, like Shedd. 

In a blog post announcing Osiris’s death, the aquarium noted that its rescued whales had been under 24-hour supervision and receiving intensive, specialized care. The aquarium is still investigating the cause of death for all four whales. 

Go a little deeper

Believe me when I tell you that it gives me no pleasure to write the following paragraphs. I really love aquariums. In fact, as a kid, I grew up visiting the now-shuttered and much-maligned Marineland. 

But incidents like these back-to-back deaths should prompt us all to ask ourselves who aquariums and zoos are actually for. And the answer, I regret to tell you, is frequently not “the animals” — though zoos and aquariums have, since the mid-20th century, marketed themselves as both tourist attractions and important players in wildlife education and conservation.  

As my colleague Kenny Torrella writes, these institutions and their defenders argue they protect animals in three ways: first, by raising money for wildlife conservation projects; second, by helping to reintroduce vulnerable species back into the wild; and third, by inspiring visitors to take an interest in the environment. The Shedd Aquarium’s motto, for instance, is “For Love of Waterkind.” 

It’s worth scrutinizing those purported virtues, however — even when prestigious and reputable institutions like Shedd are making them. On one hand, there is merit to the claim that zoos and aquariums fundraise for wildlife conservation: In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, one group of accredited zoos and aquariums spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on habitat projects. 

The evidence is thinner on the other points, though. It’s incredibly rare for aquariums and zoos to reintroduce endangered species back into the wild — that’s very difficult to do. And surveys of zoo and aquarium visitors show that merely seeing a wild animal in a tourist setting doesn’t generally galvanize people on matters of welfare or stewardship. Living in captivity in that tourist setting, however, can be stressful (or worse) for the animals themselves. 

But what would a humane alternative look like? Even if zoos and aquariums stopped catching animals in the wild, that would still leave many thousands who are injured, orphaned, born in captivity, or otherwise accustomed to human care. 

When it comes to whales, one nonprofit advocacy organization is already working on an alternative: a 110-acre coastal sanctuary for “retired” whales. That project, however, is still a long way from completion. And in the meantime, it’s up to consumers to decide whether the stated benefits of zoos and aquariums outweigh the potential harms to the animals they exhibit.

One link for later

➨ Beware the trap of “moral perfection.” We should all endeavor to live lives that embody our values, sure. But if you never board a plane because you care about the climate, or you never take your kid to zoos because you read the arguments above, then you might end up with a smaller, less-lived life. And that’s no good, either. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there have been “revolutionary” advancements in Alzheimer’s treatments in just the past five years? Two new drugs both markedly slow the progress of dementia.
• Today’s trivia: Geography time! What country is bordered by Chad to the east and Mali to the west? Hint: It is the second-largest landlocked African nation. (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the classic Broadway star who first sang hits, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” That would be Ethel Merman, whom one biographer dubbed “the most successful musical comedy performer of her generation.” 

For decades, research into Alzheimer’s disease has made painfully little progress. More than 7 million Americans are living with the disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. It’s incurable, and treatments have been hampered by groupthink, as well as by systemic fraud from some of the field’s most famous researchers.

But there are finally signs that the field is turning a corner, including two new drugs, rolled out in the last few years, that can treat Alzheimer’s directly.

“If somebody walks into a clinic right now and is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” Vox senior correspondent Dylan Scott tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram, the drugs “will hopefully have some effect in slowing down their cognitive decline.” 

As Scott says, “The drug development pipeline is also starting to look much more robust” — even “revolutionary,” to quote one doctor he spoke with.

The two talk about why researchers are more optimistic than they have been in years, whether GLP-1 drugs might help prevent Alzheimer’s, and an experimental surgery pioneered by doctors in China that has produced striking — but if unproven — reports of improvement in people with the disease.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You mentioned two treatments. Tell us what they are, Dylan?

We have two drugs right now that have been approved by the FDA: lecanemab and donanemab. And these are drugs that target the amyloid plaque in the brain that scientists have long thought might be associated with the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

The amyloid hypothesis [the belief that Alzheimer’s is caused by the buildup of deleterious amyloid proteins in the brain] has been very controversial for a while, in part because there were these years and years where we weren’t seeing any progress despite this being the dominant hypothesis about the disease. But we do have these two drugs that in clinical trials have been shown to both clear out the amyloid plaque in somebody’s brain and they do seem to lead to slower cognitive decline for those patients.

And the hope is that this is the ground floor. These are the worst drugs, hopefully, that we’re ever going to have and continued scientific discovery and progress with developing drugs will lead to even better treatments in the future.

“The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

Tell us more about the scientific discovery. You mentioned that there’s promising research beyond amyloid plaques?

It’s not like the amyloid hypothesis has been invalidated, but I think our understanding of the disease has become more complex. 

We’re realizing that there’s probably also a role for a different kind of protein called tau. There may also be a role with chronic inflammation, your vascular health, your body’s ability to just pump blood through your body may also be playing a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. And so now we’re starting to see treatments that target these other things. 

The way I’ve been thinking about it is if we used to be putting all of our bets on amyloid, we’re still putting some bets on amyloid, but we’re also putting bets on these other things. And so now there are treatments in the works targeting, for example, these tau proteins.

They’re still in the early stages of clinical trials — really at the stage where they’re just checking the safety of these drugs and making sure that somebody can take them without getting really sick, or God forbid, dying or something like that. But even when they’re doing those safety checks, they do start to collect qualitative data about, well, are we starting to see any effects? 

Some of the preliminary results from some of these tau targeting treatments that are in the works have looked pretty promising. And so that’s encouraging, obviously. It’s possible that we’re moving towards a future where not unlike cancer treatment, there’s not just one drug for Alzheimer’s disease, but maybe you take a combination of different things that work on different mechanisms for the disease and the collective cumulative effect is that it stops the progression or even reverses it. 

The hope is that five, 10 years from now, we’ve got a much more robust suite of treatments that can help somebody who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Five, 10 years from now sounds nice, but is there anything else that’s in the cocktail now that people are discovering could be promising for Alzheimer’s?

There are also, yes, drugs that millions of people are taking right now for other reasons that might also be able to help with Alzheimer’s disease. And GLP-1s in particular are the big ones.

No way!

Yeah, I know. These drugs — it seems like every day you see some new headline about this miraculous thing that they can do.

Weight loss, smoking, my poker addiction, and…?

And it might prevent dementia down the road. 

If you step back and think about it, the theory does make some sense. Like I said before, scientists increasingly think there’s an association between your vascular health and your cognitive health, especially as you age. And what do these GLP-1 drugs do? They help people lose weight. 

Losing weight helps to lower your blood pressure, lowers your risk of vascular problems, whether it’s heart disease or pulmonary disease or stroke or something like that. So if more and more people take these, they take them earlier in life, they lose weight, they keep it off, they don’t develop these heart or vascular problems, it does make some sense that that may also reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. 

It’s still sort of theoretical, but the Alzheimer’s Association is putting $100 million behind some research projects to investigate this possible link. We may learn five, 10 years from now, as millions of people are now on these GLP-1 drugs — maybe we start to see Alzheimer’s less often. And that would be another reason to be optimistic that the future for this disease is looking brighter.

How about reversing it? Is that still a pie in the sky?

It’s out of reach for now. Certainly some of the scientists that I’ve talked to have said, “In theory, it should be possible. Your brain is really resilient. It’s really good at rebuilding itself if you give it the chance.” It seems like it should be possible to stop the progression of the disease eventually, and maybe ultimately reverse it. 

Now, there has been some really intriguing, but also mysterious developments around reversing Alzheimer’s, not from scientists based out of the United States, but from scientists in China. People may or may not have seen that there have been videos of these patients who underwent an experimental surgery and the before and after of these videos is incredible.

In the before, you’ve got somebody who clearly has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize their loved ones, has trouble with their train of thought. In the after videos, it’s like they’re a completely different person. They recognize their loved ones, they’re talking articulately. And so that has, as you can imagine, generated a lot of excitement, also a fair bit of skepticism.

Are these videos real? Do we know?

We don’t know for sure if they’re real or not. What’s intriguing about this surgery is that the theory of it, at least to me as a lay person, makes some sense. 

The gist of this surgery is the surgeons create a drain in the patient’s brain and the drain is supposed to help the brain get rid of these amyloid and tau proteins that we think are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. On a hypothetical level, it makes some sense. And scientists in the United States and Europe and elsewhere have been intrigued enough about these videos and the findings that have been reported in academic journals to set up their own studies to try to replicate these findings. 

Now, it’s a crazy story because this scientist in China who pioneered this idea has actually been arrested by the Chinese government. And as I understand it, he’s currently in detention.

For what?!

The reporting I saw was these seem to be kind of flimsy charges of insurance fraud. The Chinese government has also tried to ban the surgery, at least outside of clinical trial settings. So that’s obviously complicated the story a little bit.

But nevertheless, you do have scientists in the US and outside of China who are like, “Well, we at least want to try this for ourselves and see if it works.”

It does feel like it’s something that could get people’s hopes up who have been waiting for this for decades.

Exactly. I mean, I think this is like the holy grail. Can we find a way, whether through surgery or through pharmaceuticals, to actually reverse these symptoms and restore the person to who they were before Alzheimer’s took over?

Because that’s the thing that I think everybody recognizes but is worth emphasizing, is, as one doctor put it to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, Alzheimer’s is a disease unlike any other because it robs you of your identity. 

To be able to restore people’s identity through whatever means, that is the goal that all of these scientists are chasing.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

It’s time for yet another United Nations General Assembly meeting in Manhattan — just one year after President Donald Trump appeared at it and asked, bluntly: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”

Every year around this time, roughly 130 leaders from around the world convene at the UN to deliver speeches, hold diplomatic meetings, and debate issues like AI, climate change, and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. Trump is scheduled to speak this week, as are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (…despite New York’s chilly reception). 

Even more important than those big public speeches, however, are the one-on-one talks between foreign leaders. Trump has a packed meeting schedule on Monday and Tuesday, featuring the likes of Zelenskyy, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In Trump’s famously bizarre speech last year, he attacked several US allies, called climate change a “con,” and suggested the UN itself was irrelevant. Increasingly — as we’ll get into below — that’s an accusation echoed by many UN critics.

Go a little deeper

This week’s meeting comes at a moment of crisis — or at the very least, inflection — for the United Nations. 

The UN faces a severe budgetary shortfall this year, caused largely by Trump’s refusal to pay America’s full dues. At the same time, the UN has battled searing criticism of its inability to end conflicts in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza. 

Under the organization’s founding charter, any of the five permanent members of its Security Council — the body responsible for maintaining international security — can block important resolutions unilaterally. In 2022, Russia controversially used that power to torpedo a resolution condemning its attempted annexation of parts of Ukraine. Three years later, the US similarly vetoed a demand for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an increase in unrestricted humanitarian aid.

Critics point to impasses like these as evidence the UN no longer works; even UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said the Security Council needs reform. But it would be a mistake to conclude the UN is somehow irrelevant or newly ineffectual. 

For one thing, Security Council gridlock isn’t a recent development — it’s the historical norm. (Check out all the Cold War-era vetoes in the chart above.) The UN is also far more than its Security Council — it’s a sprawling humanitarian apparatus that provides food, cash aid, medical care, and other assistance to millions around the world. 

In Gaza last year alone, for instance, the UN says it provided clean water to 1.6 million people, operated dozens of makeshift schools for Palestinian children, and distributed almost $55 million of humanitarian cash assistance.

Those efforts probably won’t make headlines this week. But they help answer Trump’s 2025 question.

One link for later

➨ Put yourself first for once. A striking new poll finds that healthcare challenges prevent a sizable plurality of women from having the careers, social relationships, and family lives they want. The problem is overwhelmingly structural, of course. But in an exclusive interview with Vox, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates warns that women are also “often taught to put themselves last,” especially when they’re caregivers.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that crows can solve puzzles as well as 5-year-olds? In one study, they were observed bending a piece of wire to fish a treat out of a tube.
• Today’s trivia: Which classic Broadway star — the most successful of her generation — debuted the songs “I Got Rhythm,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the US Supreme Court justice who succeeded John Paul Stevens. That would be Elena Kagan, an Obama nominee who was confirmed to the court in 2010.