The stoic feelings of progressive Washington were similarly subdued in the city’s more conservative corners.
WASHINGTON — The Outrage, a clothing store in the capital that has branded itself a hub of the resistance to President Trump, is a place where people have often gathered to shed tears over the latest news cycle, or to buy $32 T-shirts emblazoned with expletive-laced messages calling for the president’s impeachment.
But on Thursday, moments after the release of the special counsel’s full — if not plentifully redacted — report detailing Russian interference in the 2016 election, the outrage seemed to have momentarily left the building.
“No tears today,” Rebecca Lee Funk, the store’s founder, said of the 100 or so people who had passed through to peruse the merchandise, including $26 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-themed water bottles and activism-oriented children’s books, early Thursday afternoon. “A lot of people came to terms a month ago that this was not the report that’s going to end this administration.”
The release of the latest Big Report is a Washington tradition going back generations, with players including a prosecutor and a commission or a government agency finally releasing a study on some issue of pressing national interest. On Twitter and on cable news, the battle over defining the meaning of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, started right on schedule.
In one corner, the president distributed a “Game of Thrones”-style poster to his Twitter followers — “Game Over,” read the Trumpified version. Triumphant aides took to the White House driveway: Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, declared the entire enterprise “a political proctology exam.” In another corner, Democratic elected officials urged supporters to cover their ears when it came to the attorney general’s descriptions of the report. Others vowed to keep putting pressure on the president, whose lies they say are now well documented for all to see.
“The president and his attorney general expect the American people to be blind to what we can now see,” Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement. “This report catalogs in excruciating detail a proliferation of lies by the president to the American people, as well as his incessant and repeated efforts to encourage others to lie.”
But the rage-filled circus we see on our screens can sometimes bear little resemblance to life in the capital.
