The lower third of Washington D.C., as you'd expect, was thick with MAGA folks over the weekend. Food trucks parked along the north curb of Independence Avenue Saturday afternoon pumped great-smelling fried stuff to euphoric blonde types in the usual assortment of tacky Trump gear. Big corn-fed-looking college-aged bros clustered at crosswalks, even smirkier and chestier than usual.
The generally delightful cafe in the lobby of the Hirshhorn Museum was clogged with shiny-faced weirdos in American flag sweaters and white and gold caps proclaiming "Donald Trump Was Right About Everything," milling around near a window and waiting for their various lattes. The exhibit one floor down from the lobby was titled Basquiat x Banksy, and featured Jean-Michel Basquiat's gorgeous Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, over which Banksy had contributed Banksquiat: Boy and Dog in Stop and Search, with his usual thudding anti-subtlety. The exhibit is funded in part by conservative billionaire investor Kenneth C. Griffin, who purchased Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump in 2020 for more than $100 million, the same year that he threatened to move the offices of his hedge fund out of Illinois in protest of a graduated income tax.
Bars and restaurants in the bottom half of the city were, of course, unbearable. Big swarming groups of MAGA-clad tourists swarmed through downtown like field-tripping school kids. So many of them hit the exit gates in one wave at the Metro station at L'Enfant Plaza that someone at the front of the stampede shouted, "It's the Trump stop!" There was quiet tittering; the man in the Transit Authority hat inside the shell of the kiosk looked over the crowd with the deadest eyes I have ever seen. A gloomy, slushy Saturday in January is usually a good, quiet time for locals to be in this part of the city, except every fourth or eighth year, when if you choose your weekend poorly (as I did) you will find yourself in the hell of an inauguration celebration. The guy in the kiosk hadn't committed any follies of self-ownage; he was just riding out a shift in his home city. For being forced out into the open for a day's wages, he would have to grit his teeth amid the revelry of an invading army.
The freaks in MAGA hats hate it here. They hate the place, both the version of it that they imagine and the version of it that comes to the surface for a breath of air only after the circus leaves town. In the imagination of aggrieved Nashvillians, but also apparently in the incredibly narrow view of the national political press, D.C. is just the place where politicians and lobbyists go to battle over who to tax, and the hub of the bloodless bureaucrats whose function is to deflect that battle's cruelties onto working people. That this is a misunderstanding of the whole concept of representative government is reason enough to panic about the quality of civic education in this country.
Unfortunately, the thing that D.C. authentically is is a city with working-class black roots whose population is reliably inclined to support liberal and progressive candidates and platforms. You see the problem: Elected liberals can go turncoat and become Heroes Of Bipartisan Politics, but the working people of Washington D.C. just have to stand there, at the Metro gates or behind the cafe counter, and absorb the contempt of the victors, who in this case happen to have made a generations-old political project of keeping them and their neighbors from having full representation in the federal government.
The local government and the residents of D.C. are not allowed to say no to this shit. A consequence of the city being deprived of home rule is the people who live here have to play host to these parties, no matter how desperately they might share your urgent desire to spend the weekend under a pillow. Commerce forces everyone to their feet, in the slush, to transact with the worst people on the planet. The city's street vendors—happy to sell anything to anyone; there when the moment calls for it with "Say Her Name" T-shirts at Black Lives Matter Plaza, and there with "Take America Back" T-shirts a block from the National Museum of African American History—had a down weekend, in part due to sleet and snow, and in part because Trump's hordes tend to be all set when it comes to costuming, a consequence of having chosen for their avenging figurehead a sloganeering huckster.
The joke was almost on the visitors—consensus has it that downtown sucks and there are no good places to eat or drink. These freaks spent their weekend milling around the worst part of a city while their guy threw his party indoors and invited approximately none of them. But then you remember that surrendering for nothing more than spite the virtues of the things that are being profaned—government, and a city, and its public spaces, and an art gallery—is the work of the weekend's invading force. The last time these people met together in this place in these numbers it was to storm the U.S. Capitol and overthrow democracy. It goes without saying that Trump's supporters want nothing to do with the works of Basquiat, and even less to do with a ham-fisted statement about over-policing from a pseudonymous British dude. The reasons to crowd into the art gallery were straightforward: for coffee, to escape the cold drizzle, and to make sure that everyone else was miserable.
