One of the oldest traditions in American politics is « running against Washington, » which has been a common campaign theme since the city was
One of the oldest traditions in American politics is « running against Washington, » which has been a common campaign theme since the city was first created as the capital and the home of the federal government.
In fact, candidates for president and Congress have found running against Washington one of the surest ways to get there. Some do it to stay there, too.
Take for example Ronald Reagan, whose talk of the « puzzle palace on the Potomac » drew on the tradition and amplified it. For years, Reagan repeated a stock joke about the nine most feared words in the language: « I’m from the government and I’m here to help. »
Reagan displaced Jimmy Carter, who himself had been elected as an outsider in 1976 to clean house following the Watergate scandal. Not long after Reagan we got Bill Clinton in 1992, yet another governor with no taint of Washington, followed by two more two-term presidents who had spent minimal time in the capital and could plausibly pose as outsiders.
Yet now we may be in a new phase of this phenomenon, as the candidate running most vehemently against Washington is also the city’s most prominent resident.
Surely President Trump in 2016 was as skilled and effective at this line of politicking as any candidate in memory. He made a mantra of « drain the swamp » and let his crowds chant « lock them up. » Still, it raises eyebrows to hear him continue the assault as an incumbent seeking a second term.
As political writer Matt Bai has noted in The Washington Post, Trump is acting as though he had nothing to do with his own government – dissociating himself from all that has gone wrong on his watch and even saying at one point: « I take no responsibility at all. »
Bai argues that Trump has never really seen himself as part of the government he supposedly leads and has « already proved that governing interests [him] about as much as mold. »
At the same time, Trump has urgently invoked non-existent privileges of office (« Any conversation with me is classified ») and overstated his control of the military and even the governors of the states (« When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be…it’s total, the governors know that »).
Trump has also elevated and empowered an attorney general in William Barr who has long espoused a vision of executive power as expansive as any since Alexander Hamilton’s six-hour lecture on the subject at the Constitutional Convention.
Trump is running not so much against specific parts of the government as against the idea of Washington, which is to say the idea that someone somewhere has a lot more power than you do and is using it against your best interests.
