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.
