Locusts Have Descended on the White House. Coincidence?

Or is this the third plague of Exodus?

The Plague of Locusts, c. 1896–1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot | Public Domain

Here’s something that will not surprise anyone who spent more time in zoology class than Bible class.

Ecosystems bite back.

Piss off Mother Nature, and she doesn’t call lawyers. She calls floods, fires, pestilence, plague, and locusts.

The Bible understood this long before ecology had a lab coat. Plagues arrive when power gets arrogant enough to believe it can abuse the natural order and still dine outdoors in clean linen.

Which is why we need to talk about the White House Rose Garden.

Before it became another crime scene in Trump’s lifelong war on taste, it was not just pretty scenery for state dinners and soft-focus photographs. It was a living system — flowers, trees, roots, shade, moisture, memory. A small green lung attached to the most powerful office in the world.

Jacqueline Kennedy understood nature’s delicate balance. In 1962, the Kennedys brought in landscape designer Bunny Mellon to help remake the Rose Garden. (Which is possibly the only acceptable name for a woman trusted to improve Camelot with pruning shears.)

Bunny planted flowers, including varieties that bloomed during Thomas Jefferson’s time in office, crabapple trees, four saucer magnolias, tulips, and grape hyacinth. Foreign leaders loved the gardens so much that they asked to hold meetings there instead of the Oval Office. Staff called it the outdoor Oval Office.

Bunny believed that “the one flower that unites all the occupants through the history of the White House is the rose.”

Those roses survived every administration for six decades.

Then came Donald Trump.

In the summer of 2025, Trump ripped out the Rose Garden and paved over it with white stones. He modeled it after the patio at Mar-a-Lago. Obviously.

Jackie’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, offered the most accurate critique: “My grandmother saw America in full color. Trump sees black and white. Where she planted flowers, he poured concrete.”

John F. Kennedy Jr. in the White House Rose Garden, April 26, 1963. Photograph by Cecil Stoughton | Public Domain

At this point, you might ask why? Just why? Why must this malignant narcissist replace every last symbol of grace, restraint, and public beauty with the ambiance of a Palm Beach valet circle?

The answer: women’s heels.

“Do you see the women?” Trump told The Spectator. “The grass was wet. Their heels are going right through the grass, like four inches deep.”

Only four inches deep, Donald? Better check with Freud on that one.

Now, let’s pause to consider Trump’s gallantry toward the womenfolk. President “grab em’ by the pussy” promised to release the Epstein files and didn’t. He famously bragged about walking into teenage girls’ dressing rooms because, I dunno, creepy old men like ogling half-naked beauty pageant contestants. He casually mentioned that he would have sex with his daughter if she weren’t his daughter. He was found liable by a freakin’ jury for sexual abuse. That guy — THAT white knight — paved over Jackie Kennedy’s garden to save the trad wives from grass stains.

If you smell bullshit, congratulations. So did an uninvited pest.

Grandpa’s Birthday Cage Match for Oligarchs

Fast forward to 2026. Trump is turning 80. And what do you get the man who has everything, including a freshly paved Rose Garden, a luxury bribe jet, and a golden statue of himself?

You throw yourself a UFC-themed birthday party like a big boy.

It’s got all of Trump’s favorite things: spectacle, makeup, bruises covered up with makeup, humiliation rituals, pyrotechnics, loyalty chants, manufactured enemies, manufactured masculinity, and it is all a giant make-believe con. The crowd is not there to deliberate; they are there to boo, cheer, and experience emotional catharsis.

Of course, Trump has graciously merged his octogenarian shindig with America’s 250th birthday — the anniversary of the last time this country told a king to go fuck himself. Irony is lost on some.

Now, TKO Group Holdings — the corporation that owns the UFC — is staging cage fighting on YOUR lawn. The people’s lawn. The lawn maintained by the people’s taxes. The lawn that belongs to the 330 million Americans who are, coincidentally, currently not invited.

Dana White didn’t even try to hide it. His exact words about why they’re doing this: “earned media,” “sampling,” “new fans,” “casual viewers,” “expand our audience,” “our viewership,” “our success on Paramount+.”

Those are not the words of a patriot honoring America’s 250th birthday. Those are the words of a marketing deck. TKO is basically shooting a commercial to advertise its Paramount+ deal, while charging $1.5 million a seat for the privilege of appearing in the shot.

Then Mr. White told the rest of America they could watch on a screen in a park.

And THEN — this is the part where the universe finally lost its patience — he got gnats. Giant biblical eyeball-seeking, mouth-entering, little airborne pestilent gnats.

White delivered the following scientific assessment: “The amount of gnats flying around. Holy shit.”

Welcome to consequences, Dana.

Flies on Shit

Here is what they teach you in zoology class, which nobody attends anymore because somewhere along the way we decided that defunding education was a winning long-term strategy: living grass cools the air around it. It breathes. It sweats. Scientists call this transpiration. Regular people call it “why it feels nice to walk barefoot on a lawn in summer.”

Pave over the grass, and you create what ecologists call an urban heat island — a surface that absorbs heat all day and radiates it back at night, warming the air, accelerating insect breeding cycles, and producing exactly the warm, humid, organic-matter-rich microclimate that gnats have been thriving in since the Carboniferous period.

And now White has a second problem — the main lighting rig that will illuminate the South Lawn, called The Claw. Insects are phototactic. Biologically, neurologically, evolutionarily compelled to move toward light. The Claw is a $60 million porch light aimed directly at a gnat breeding ground that Trump created himself.

White’s mitigation strategy is industrial fans. Because gnats, he noted with the energy of a man who absolutely did not pay attention in zoology class, “have a hard time in the wind.”

When should we tell him that “wind” is also one of the ways tiny flying insects get around? This is not a strategy. This is giving the gnats an Uber. The gnats have been doing this for 300 million years. They are not worried about the fans, especially when a heated breeding ground awaits.

Better yet, let’s turn to history.

Two thousand years ago, the Romans invented bread and circuses. Even they understood the homework assignment better than this. Roman emperors threw the party for the people. You needed the mob to feel like participants. You needed them inside the tent, drunk on cheap wine, cheering for the lions. The moment the crowd realizes they’re not guests but scenery, you have a problem.

Today, our oldest sitting president in American history, looked at his own 80th birthday, looked at America’s 250th, looked at the people’s house, and charged a million and a half dollars for a folding chair.

Now, the Christian Nationalists who have spent the better part of a decade constructing an elaborate messiah narrative around this particular diapered 80-year-old would like you to know that it is okay to desecrate the people’s house because…God has chosen this man.

I repeat: God has chosen Trump.

Cool. Cool. Okay, I would like to gently direct their attention to the Book of Exodus.

You know the plagues. Most people know the plagues — locusts, frogs, darkness, the death of the firstborn, etc. What the Christian Nationalist crowd appears to have missed (possibly because the relevant Sunday school curriculum was cut along with the arts program and recess) is that the plagues did not descend on the oppressed. They descended on Pharaoh. On the seat of power. On the palace. They were nature’s invoice — itemized, specific, delivered directly to the address of the man doing the oppressing.

Let’s Keep Our Plagues Straight

Now, I promised locusts in this tale, and I plan to deliver. Sort of. Because goddamn it, people, I finally get to put ten years of Bible study to use and make Sr. Carmelita proud.

According to the ten plagues of Exodus — the only science textbook the new regime hasn’t banned yet — locusts are number eight on God’s pissed-off list. Fortunately, God gives more insect warnings before plague #10 hits, murdering your firstborn. So we got time.

Gnats, incidentally, are plague number three. Look it up.

God didn’t open with locusts. He didn’t open with darkness or death. He opened with the Nile turning to blood, then a weirdo frog infestation, and then — before anything else, before the flies, before the boils, before a single locust showed up — He sent gnats. To Pharaoh’s house.

And when they arrived, even Pharaoh’s own magicians — men who had somehow managed to fake blood rivers and frog weather — looked at the gnats and said nope. Above our pay grade. This one’s real. “This is the finger of God,” they told Pharaoh.

Meanwhile, the gnats assessed the situation. They’ve seen empires before. They were here before the dinosaurs. They will be here after us. They do not recognize a guest list. They do not care about Paramount+. They cannot be bought off with a VIP package.

That’s what happens when you pave over a garden. Nature sends the invoice. Or some little friends. And gnats, unlike the Department of Justice, don’t need to fly up Donald Trump’s ass to survive.

You see, gnats are simple flies. They eat shit. They are, by evolutionary design, drawn to decomposition, decay, and rot. They are going to feel right at home at a party full of shitbag billionaires.

So when the gnats descend on the South Lawn on June 14th — into the faces of the billionaires, into the octagon, into the sleeping mouth of the oldest sitting president in American history — I don’t want to hear a single joke about locusts attacking the White House. Because we are not at plague eight. We are at plague three.

And that means there is still time to let the people go.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.