Why Trump’s 250 Grand Prix Is a Really Bad Idea

It isn’t smart to host an Indy 500 race that roars past six museums and a sculpture garden.

President Donald Trump is a whiz at creating problems out of things that you never, ever worried about before. The latest concerns the Freedom 250 Grand Prix (“Let Freedom Rev!”), an Indy 500 race set for August 22 and 23 around the National Mall. The Grand Prix threatens damage to what may be the densest concentration of historic, scientific, and fine arts treasures anywhere in the United States, from the 76-by-30-foot Calder mobile dangling from the ceiling of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights at the National Archives to the Wright Brothers plane and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis hanging in the National Air and Space Museum. These objects, and many more, reside in buildings situated along the Grand Prix route, and the vibrations caused by two days of twin-turbocharged V-6 engine-powered Indy cars tearing past them at 200-plus miles per hour won’t exactly be good for them.

If you haven’t heard of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, that’s probably because you’re distracted by the Iran War, or the 60 or so people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has killed during the past 18 months, or the 33 arrests, prosecutions, and investigations of Trump’s political enemies thus far by the Justice department, or the outrageous self-enrichment that has allowed Trump to increase his net worth by roughly $3.5 billion. Or, if you’ve been following my coverage of the pending sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, perhaps you’re worried about the threat to New Deal murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel in that building—which also figure in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix story, because the Cohen is on the Grand Prix route, too.

It’s hard to imagine a worse place than the National Mall for an Indy 500 race. Apart from the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Air and Space Museum, and the Cohen building, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix route will roar past the National Gallery’s outdoor sculpture garden, the Museum of the American Indian, the Hirschorn, Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial, and the National Museum of Natural History. The National Museum of American History, which contains Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled banner and the Revolutionary-war era Gunboat Philadelphia, is one block away. The gunboat, an extraordinary thing to see, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, even though it isn’t precisely a “place.”

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