Washington has never been a particularly friendly place for Donald Trump
Washington has never been a particularly friendly place for Donald Trump. And after pleading not guilty to federal charges that he had tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Trump was quick to show that the feeling was mutual.
“It was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C., and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” he said on the tarmac of Reagan National Airport in Virginia, just a few miles away. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see it.”
Trump’s comments drew some skepticism due to the fact that he basically was on two blocks of the district’s streets. His route to and from the airport took him past one of the district’s larger shelters for homeless people, but “filth and decay” drew some eye rolls from longtime Washington defenders.
“He’s just talking off the top of his head and angry to be back in D.C.,” said Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives. “He saw D.C. for less than a minute.”
Norton also pointed out that when Trump last left Washington as president, the downtown federal area was essentially a militarized zone, with massive fences around the U.S. Capitol after Trump supporters overran the building on Jan. 6, 2021.
In fairness, heavily Democratic Washington — while generally cool to all Republican presidents — was distinctly hostile to the Trump administration. Multiple Trump Cabinet members were publicly berated by activists while eating in district restaurants. And Trump’s decision to skip the Kennedy Center Honors every year was usually a relief for organizers, who would have faced annual boycott threats from different artists if he did attend.
Trump got just over 4% of the presidential election vote in the district in 2016 and 5.
