Over the final few weeks of his presidential campaign, at rallies all over the country, President-elect Donald Trump took up a new slogan: “Drain the swamp!” His audience, presumably tired of insider shenanigans from Washington, D.C., ate it up. They chanted the phrase in unison, cheering with relish.
There’s a good reason for this: Most normal, well-adjusted non-Beltway Americans harbor a vigorous and healthy disdain for Washington, D.C. As any well-intentioned visitor to our nation’s capital can tell you, the sights are indeed grand, and the history is inspiring. But sadly, between the trips to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery, one begins to grow rightly suspicious when passing countless upscale bars filled with sometimes-smug 28-year-olds getting hammered on $16 cocktails that were purchased, either directly or indirectly, with your own hard-earned tax dollars.
For most Americans, in other words, a glitzy Washington, D.C., is not a healthy Washington, D.C. A gleaming, prosperous industry town usually makes for a cheerful sight, but not when that “industry” revolves around taking other people’s money — truly mind-boggling amounts of money! — and transforming it into subsidized incompetence, black-hole accounting, and a leading export of sanctimony.
Ah, but never fear. The New York Times sees things differently from flyover America, as it tends to do. After a flurry of post-election stories bemoaning the various potential downsides of President Trump — some legitimate, some not — the storied Gray Lady decided to run with this doozy: “A Newly Vibrant Washington Fears That Trump Will Drain Its Culture.”
One could write a doctoral thesis regarding the multiple-layered ironies within this headline, or merely stare at it and marvel for days. As a bonus, it ran just one day after an equally spectacular headline: “Is Fashion’s Love Affair with Washington Over?” This piece, showing extra chutzpah, earnestly praised Hillary Clinton’s purple and black concession-speech pantsuit, which resembled the getup of a fancy comic-book villain, as “the end of what might have been an extraordinary relationship” between style and our nation’s capital. Okay.
This tone-deaf bonanza should come as no surprise, of course. In the election’s wake, even Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, noted that the paper was profoundly out of touch. “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to,” he said, “and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”
Well, folks, apparently neither is Washington, D.C. Once a staid, boring town plagued by a general sense of malaise, the nation’s capital, at least according to the Times, is now a progressive wonderland. “The administrations of two Bushes and a Clinton in between hardly had an effect on the city,” but thanks to the arrival of the Obamas, the city has undergone “an urban renaissance.”
According to former D.C. mayor Vincent Gray, Obama and his family “brought a level of dynamism that just wasn’t there before.” Among these reported wonders, we read, are SoulCycle, thriving independent bookstores that sell terrible Jonathan Franzen novels, and a bevy of happening 14th Street bars frequented by Obama staffers, with “their barhopping chronicled in the gossip pages.” (Side note: This last item is one of the reasons that the rest of America loves to hate D.C.)
