Welcome to Email News: Trump returns to the city he loves to hate

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February 1, 2024

Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

What it took to get Trump back to Washington

Donald Trump was back in Washington Wednesday – the city he professes to despise.

The former president was in the capital for a meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – a major trade union – as he tries to peel away blue collar votes from President Joe Biden.

He was perhaps also collecting impressions for his next unflattering depiction of the city in a future campaign speech.

Washington – with its gun crime and carjackings – has taken a starring role in the GOP front-runner's 2024 stump speech as he tries to create a dystopian picture of a nation and its citadel trapped in the grip of lawlessness that requires a strongman's attention.

"You can't walk down the streets of these cities these days without being shot or mugged or beat up or pushed into a subway train," Trump said in a dark speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on January 20. "We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, DC, and clean it up, renovate it, rebuild it. It'll be a capital like no other."

Trump went on: "Our capital is a disgrace, I was there for one of these fake trials the other day a couple of weeks ago, and I'm driving down a major thoroughfare … and there was so much garbage that we were literally driving over cartons and boxes and cans of beer." The former president was exaggerating the city's current state, even though it does have its problems, especially since the pandemic.

Trump has returned several times since his disgraced departure from the District as president in January 2021, when the US Capitol still bore the scars of his supporters' mob invasion.

He's not been much missed in this overwhelmingly Democratic bastion. And the feeling is mutual. The ex-president has never hidden his disgust for the city where he slept – or tweeted late into the night – for parts of four years when he was the commander in chief.

No modern president has been as visceral about Washington as Trump – and his contempt offers insight into his politics and his character. The ex-president's core political project is dedicated to metaphorically tearing down a city that exists to provide governance. It's the foundation of what ex-Trump political guru Steve Bannon calls the administrative state.

If he's elected to a second term, Trump has pledged to gut the professional civil service. Washington, in the eyes of Trump and his supporters, is the epicenter of a corrupt Deep State that is dedicated to destroying the "Make America Great Again" movement and is a playground for political and media elites.

For its part, Washington is trying to forget Trump. Its marbled monuments were the backdrop for some of the most notorious moments of his political career and have highlighted his autocratic leanings.

One of the darkest moments of his presidency came when Trump corralled members of his Cabinet and marched across Lafayette Square, shortly after it was cleared of racial injustice protesters, to St. John's Church, where presidents-elect often worship before their inaugurations. In a bizarre photo-op, he then held up a Bible.

Then there was the most chilling moment in modern presidential history, when Trump held a massive rally on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, and told his crowd to "fight like hell" for their country before the mob ransacked the Capitol building in an attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden's 2020 victory.

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'He's just toxic'

As she battles to keep her Republican presidential campaign alive, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is finally getting tough on Trump.

"He's made it chaotic. He's made it self-absorbed. He's made people dislike and judge each other. He's left that a president should have moral clarity, and know the difference between right or wrong, and he's just toxic," Haley said in a radio interview Wednesday.

"I think a lot of the things he broke needed to be broken, but he doesn't know how to fix things again, and it's not okay to just break. You got to fix it, make it better. And he hasn't done that."

Presidents who left their mark on Washington

Roosevelt and some friends rock climb in Rock Creek Park between 1901 and 1908. (Theodore Roosevelt Center)

Not all presidents despise Washington as much as Trump. Some at least tried to get out from the gilded cage that is the White House.

Theodore Roosevelt went rock climbing in Rock Creek Park, and decades later, Ronald Reagan saddled up to burnish his cowboy persona and went horseback riding there. Abraham Lincoln used to escape the swampy summers to a cottage in Northwest DC where he'd also visit with wounded Civil War soldiers. And of course, he went to the theater at least once, with tragic results. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who served as naval officers, loved to take the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia, down the Potomac River. The vessel was decommissioned by Jimmy Carter, a former submariner who was perhaps more comfortable beneath the waves.

Nixon's most lasting impact on Washington, however, was that he made the Watergate office complex famous after a raid by Republican operatives on the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee spawned a scandal that toppled him. In recent years, some Democratic presidents have adopted the city's call for political self-determination, adding the slogan "No Taxation without Representation" to the license tags of the presidential limousine.

Presidents have also often ventured out of the White House for refreshment. Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Warren Harding are all said to have patronized Old Ebbitt Grill, which is open still just around the corner. During the Clinton and Obama administrations it was not unusual to see the presidential motorcade idling outside some of the city's top restaurants in Georgetown and downtown.

Trump, however, rarely went anywhere to socialize apart from his former hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, whose bars and restaurants became a hot spot for administration officials and Trump-world figures like Rudy Giuliani and a must-see for MAGA tourists

The Old Ebbitt Grill, pictured here in 2012.

Thanks for reading.

On Thursday, US President Joe Biden attends the National Prayer Breakfast on Capitol Hill. Later, Biden travels to the Detroit Metro area to attend an event hosted by the United Auto Workers. NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoană and other NATO ambassadors visit Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Special European Council meeting is held in Brussels to discuss budgets and aid to Ukraine.

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