White House considers plan to build permanent fencing around Lafayette Park

Lafayette Park has been fenced off before, most memorably during the 2020 riots, and Washington survived it just fine. Now the White House is looking at making that fencing permanent, and the trigger this time isn't civil unrest but the simple fact that people keep trying to kill the president. Two assassination attempts in one summer will do that to a security posture. Nobody should pretend this is some abstract debate about aesthetics versus openness. It's a response to a documented, repeated threat against the man who holds the office, whoever he happens to be.

There's a real cost here, and we're not going to wave it away. Lafayette Park is one of those places that's supposed to feel like it belongs to the public, tourists snapping photos, protesters with signs, the whole messy tableau of a country that lets people stand across from the White House and yell about it. Permanent fencing chips away at that, and it sets a precedent that future administrations will lean on whether or not the threat level justifies it. Once the fence goes up, it tends to stay up.

But the alternative is pretending the last several months didn't happen. A president who has already survived attempts on his life doesn't get the luxury of nostalgia about open plazas. Security decisions like this should be made by the people whose job is actually protecting him, not by op-ed writers worried about symbolism. If Trump signs off on it, that's a call he's earned the right to make.

The bigger question is whether this becomes a permanent feature of the presidency itself, one more inch of distance between the White House and the country it answers to. That's worth watching closely, regardless of who's living there next.