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He got the wrong end of the stick. Donald Trump couldn’t figure out how to hold the green flag until his wife, Melania Trump, and Command Sgt Maj Matt Williams set him right. Then the US president waved the flag fast and furious like an excited schoolboy. The race was under way – and his conquest of Washington DC was complete.

Since returning to Washington, Trump has deployed the national guard, wrecked the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, demolished the East Wing of the White House and run the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into the ground. His face adorns the Department of Justice, and he still has grand plans for a triumphal arch worthy of a Roman emperor.

On Sunday he made the nation’s capital tremble with fast, flashy cars brazenly roaring around a 1.7-mile street circuit in IndyCar’s Freedom ⁠250 Grand Prix, the capstone of his Maga-flavoured celebration of the 250th anniversary of US independence.

Washington was not built for a Trump rally on wheels and had to make accommodations, like a party host bracing for a noisy and obnoxious guest. More than 200 manhole covers were welded down around the course so they would not be sucked up by cars thundering over them. The National Gallery of Art studied how vibrations from the vehicles might affect its exhibits and shielded some outdoor sculptures.

Indeed, as the vehicles whizzed by the National Archives, home to America’s desperately fragile founding documents, and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit requires constant vigilance, it was not hard to imagine anxious curators twitching at every rattle of crockery or spillage of tea.

Not that the president seemed to be sweating it. While officially the Grand Prix was open to everyone – and DC’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, declared, “Drivers, to your cars!” – the event had a distinctly Trumpian flavour reminiscent of June’s Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts on the White House South Lawn.

The UFC impresario Dana White, testosterone avenger Pete Hegseth and “human printer” Natalie Harp, who would wait for Trump as ardently as Penelope did for Odysseus, were among the guests. Democratic socialists were less in evidence. IndyCar is neither Woke 1 nor Woke 2.

Wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt and red tie, Trump gave fist pumps and shook hands with the IndyCar drivers. They posed for photographers, Trump giving his signature thumbs up, as the sun gleamed off the US Capitol dome beyond.

The president gave a perfunctory TV interview to the Fox network. Why was it important for him to bring IndyCars to the streets of DC? The reply was very Trumpian: “Well, Roger [Penske, a billionaire who owns the IndyCar series] told me they’ve been trying to do it for 20 years, and he’d come down; I think he said he was down 211 times to try and get it done. And when he came to see Trump, it got done in about 15 minutes, and it’s turned out to be much bigger than we ever even thought possible.”

Translation: every previous administration and mayor thought this plan was madness, and told Penske where to go. Note also the characteristic reference to “Trump” in the third person, and the boast that only he could fix it, and in 15 minutes. (If only ending the Ukraine war were so easy.)

A ceremonial trundle

True to form, the president also bragged about the crowd size and, as he has done since UFC night, insisted that he knows better than the meteorologists. “You know, I was hearing about rain all week long. ‘It’s gonna rain, it’s gonna rain.’ I said: ‘No, it’s not.’ And this is as nice today as I’ve seen in Washington in a long time.”

Trump climbed into his armoured limousine, the Beast, mounted with flags and flashing blue and red lights, and trundled a ceremonial lap of the track. Was that Harp sprinting after him? Or hiding in the trunk? No, but we did get the Qatari-gifted plane that Trump has used as Air Force One flying overhead, escorted by four fighter jets.

Then Christopher Macchio, one of Trump’s favourite singers, performed The Star-Spangled Banner as Trump saluted and Melania, wearing a white blouse, stood with hand on heart in the presidential box, a temporary white, air-conditioned structure with a clear front.

A trained bald eagle was released near the start line, swooping and flying overhead before returning to its handler. There were flyovers of military aircraft including a B-2 stealth bomber. Officials paused air traffic at Washington’s Ronald Reagan ​National airport for three hours to ​accommodate them.

It fell to another stalwart ally, interior secretary Doug Burgum, sporting sunglasses, to bellow: “Gentlemen, start your engines!”

The race began, with drivers completing 147 laps covering roughly 250 miles (400km), and produced an American winner in Kyle Kirkwood.

It was the latest chapter of a sporting summer in which Trump inserted himself into the UFC fights, the football World Cup final and the Patriot Games, a cross between a game show and athletics meet for high schoolers.

Never slow to demonstrate his fealty to Trump, Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, told Fox News that he wants to bring the IndyCar Grand Prix back next year and make it an annual event.

By then, one hopes, Trump will have figured out how to hold and wave a green flag. Or as they say in Iran, a white flag.