The morning after the night before

I confessed in an earlier post that I was skipping the inauguration in Washington DC and spending a few nights in New York. (I can totally recommend the just-ending Siena exhibition at the Met, which will be coming to the National Gallery soon – if the London iteration is half as good, then do go.) But I was a bit naive. I had assumed that when I returned to DC the morning after the inauguration, everything would be back to normal. Yes and no. The infrastructure of celebrations is always slow to dismantle, certainly slower to dismantle than to erect.

We arrived at Union Station back from NYC on Tuesday, only to realize that it had been the location for one of the previous evening’s balls. Actually, it had been mostly cleared up (only a small amount of ball detritus still to be removed). Part of the street scene was the same. Most of the flags had been returned to half-mast (in memory of Jimmy Carter), and the stars and stripes had been taken down from Pennsylvania Avenue. But the sidewalk barriers (put up when they still expected an outdoor parade) hadn’t been removed. And on Wednesday morning people were still complaining, like I was, that they couldn’t walk to work because the barriers were blocking the path. No journalist from the UK waits to see what happens after the parade is over.

I did ask my friends who stayed in downtown DC what it had been like. There were two main responses. One was to say what a mixed crowd had arrived to celebrate the Trump victory: on the one hand some ordinary Republicans pleased at their success, on the other hand posses of the terrifying Proud Boys, and I am told truly terrifying. The other was the rubbish: the piles of abandoned bags. The biggest pile they told me was outside the Capital One Arena, where Mr Trump’s rally was held. You could not enter with bags, and there was no place to leave them. So, people just ditched everything to get in. And it was all later put in the trash and cleared away (Vuitton and all), more quickly than the barriers.

I am not sorry to have left town. But I do wonder what it would have been like to be there.

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