A cold day in Hell

I was somewhere around McPherson Square on the edge of the park when the cold began to hit. It entered through my teeth, sparking a series of small spikes driving up into my eyeballs from below. Accounting for the wind chill, we were wallowing in some 12 degrees Fahrenheit—which, fair enough, is chilly. But I’ve been to the high Arctic on four occasions and didn’t recall this particular eyeball skewer, so I figured part of it was due to the particular events of this day.

It wasn’t lost on me that the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Trump’s second inauguration fell in the same moment. Living inside the Beltway and pondering our national future, I felt obliged to witness some part of both of them in person. Today, I’m writing about what I saw and the lessons I’ll take from it, as well a little bit on the opening salvo of executive orders from Trump and what they indicate.

The first shock, even before the chilly air, was how empty the trains were heading downtown. All of them. The outdoor events had been canceled due to the cold, but for a normal inauguration, for the women’s January 2017 march, and for any DC happening, even a baseball game, trains were often loaded up six or seven stops—all the way back to my station in northern Virginia. But there was no one around. After I got on, the emptiness continued. The closer I got to the city, the more police and national guard appeared, but only one or two new riders were visible at each station.

At hotel-heavy Rosslyn, just before crossing into DC, I assumed we might encounter our first crowd. But we gained only a lone man who declared he was from Florida. He wore a hip-length heavy fur coat (the first of many I saw yesterday) and said he was trying to get to Dulles airport, which meant he was going the wrong way. He’d had been robbed of his cellphone and iPad the day before, he said, and vowed vengeance. He just wanted to go home. I explained how to get to the airport and sent him on his way.

I’d planned to start at McPherson Square, where a march to celebrate MLK’s legacy was slated to begin at 10am. Arriving a half-hour early, I found only two Ukrainian filmmakers and their French colleague. They’d come to cover the MLK march, too. Given the lack of people, we suspected it had been cancelled because of the weather. Before leaving the park, we took turns getting images of the lone protester who finally arrived wearing a pussy hat and clutching a sign that said “Unite against racism.”

Thousands had protested Trump’s policies on the Mall over the weekend. Hundreds would soon gather at Malcolm X park and Dupont Circle as Trump took the oath of office. But activity in the heart of DC’s business sector and the federal seat of power, was a ghost of prior inaugurations, a ghost even of normal weekend and holiday traffic.

On Capitol Hill

I took the train to Capitol South, where huge gates and bevies of cops were blocking any close approach to the Hill. A few people were milling to see if they might catch a glimpse of new administration celebrities coming or going through the gates. Many of them had gotten tickets for the outdoor events from their representatives but were now out of luck and couldn’t get into the Capitol Rotunda.

A brief buzz arose, due to someone putting on a giant rat costume, at which people began to take offense. But it was just PETA, handing out material about animal experiments. Given the many other possibilities that could have been much more insulting to the incoming president, no one seemed to mind. Everyone snapped pictures of the giant rat.

I began approaching people in the crowd, first talking to a woman from Missouri who talked about the unity of the people, and how important it was for Trump to bring Americans together and stop the spread of hate.

Then she said, “It’s time for us to take our country back. We’ve allowed a lot of people in here, and I’m all for immigrants coming in, but we need to do it the right way and the safe way. Having someone coming in and stomp on your flag and burn your flag is not somebody you trust with your country.”

I talked to her companion, also from Missouri, who brought up a concern over US aid to other countries going unaudited, believing “a gross negligence of taxpayer dollars” was underway. He mentioned his enthusiasm for DOGE, which he thought would be an effective way to establish oversight over federal government spending, then added that immigration is a big issue for him.

“I would like to see legal pathways reinstated but in a healthy manner,” he said. Asked about ways that Trump immigration policy changes might create camps or other crises, he added, “I think if we put feelings over facts, we’re just not going to ever solve any issues. We make way too many mistakes with not enforcing the rule of law."

After talking to a few more white people, the themes of Trump as a uniter, excitement over DOGE, and overwhelmingly, their wish to close the border formed a pattern. I set my sights on a person of color who stood out in the crowd, to see if he had the same convictions. I sidled up to him and waited for a minute or two, as we both looked out on the dozens of people milling around. He had a nice jacket and a cabbie’s hat. I asked if he had a minute to answer a one or two questions about his feelings on the current state and future of the country.

“I’d like to help you out,” he said, smiling without turning to look at me. “But I’m on duty.”

On the metro

When I got back on the train heading away from Capitol Hill, I found a group of people going the same way. A woman from Oregon talked to me briefly on camera about how we need to take care of our own people at home instead of immigrants. Her friends told me what others had said on the Hill: they didn’t want to give names or be photographed.

One of them mentioned that she has a good friend who’s Mexican, and her friend had a really hard time coming to the U.S. legally, because of the convoluted process. As a result of witnessing her friend’s plight, she understood that the system is incredibly difficult for those trying to do the right thing and needs to be reformed. But her first priority for now, she said, remains that “they need to close the border.”

I approached two men, who told me to catch up to their friend, because “He’ll say it so much better than we will.” Their friend turned out to be a lawyer named Greg, who told me, “People are tired of the liberal mindset—all the woke, DEI, CRT. It’s done.”

With beer on his breath at 11am, he told me that the country is “back to a meritocracy and returning to its roots.” He himself had run for board of education, he told me, and was trying to pass a law on parental notification, one which had been stopped by a judge. But he believed his side would prevail.

He said Biden had gone too far with liberalism. Given that concern, I asked, was there any danger of Trump overreach in the other direction? No, he assured me, due to checks and balances in our system, “anything too extreme would get bogged down in courts, and we’ll end up somewhere in the middle, in a good place.”

The next person I coaxed into speaking with me was a Latina woman named Melinda from San Antonio, who told me that she was counting on Trump for relief and healing for the country. She wanted America to go back to its foundational aspects. I asked what that looked like in terms of policy. She answered, “Shut the border, and get rid of them. Get rid of DEI, too. You don’t get a job just because you’re black or Latino. You can be one, but you have to be qualified.”

At the arena

I left Metro Center Station, where there were likewise no people left, other than the cops and the national guard contingents sent to the city for the inauguration. I met men from units out of Buffalo and Peekskill at two different stops, and at another station, a unit from Delaware.

Waiting for the next train, I saw twenty or thirty people get off. Then the station quickly emptied out in ways I had never seen happen the forty years I’ve been living in the area, at one point completely without daytime passengers.

On F Street, I finally found a few more people. Where maybe a couple hundred had lined to try to get a glimpse of Trump’s motorcade, I met an Italian immigrant who’d become a U.S. citizen. He had moved from Europe after “globalists” had taken over and brought the country into the European Union. He’d seen the same trend in recent years here, he explained, and it worried him—hence the support for Trump.

“You have to take care of your country,” he said. You have to protect the national identity. You want a certain pride in the nation.”

I met a husband and wife from South Carolina outside the giant gates used to block the streets near Capital One Arena. They were accompanied by their son, a 2022 graduate from Duke University.

They asked if I knew about the false rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse players from 2006. They said they had been terrified for their son at college.

“My son was afraid of girls,” the mother confided. “He never dated while he was there.” The father explained how even if their son had gotten sexual consent in writing, the university officials whom the parents had questioned about the matter said it would be impossible to protect him if a girl changed her mind.

The son changed the subject slightly, saying, “In all of higher education, there is not a single conservative.”

Asked about issues that were important to them, they mentioned prioritizing education over DEI then went through the litany on DOGE and immigration that I’d heard a dozen times by now. At one point in their list of priorities, the husband and wife chanted in unison, “Drill baby drill” excitedly, as if happy to recall another catchphrase to repeat. I asked them if there was any danger of overreach under Trump.

“No,” the father answered, shaking his head. “That’s not Trump’s style.”

“He uses common sense,” the mother added.

By this point, the hope that those waiting would be allowed inside the gates or any closer to the arena had passed. I made my way back the direction I’d come.

I soon ran into the cameraman from the Ukrainian crew again, a mile away from where we’d met earlier in the day. It was probably inevitable. There were just weren’t that many people to talk to outside.

Going to church

Since Monday’s MLK march to the African Methodist Episcopal Church on M Street had been cancelled, I thought I’d see if the memorial speeches were still taking place there. I headed over to M Street, to the legendary church I’d walked by many times but had never entered.

A lot of security officers stood inside the doors, but the church was open to everyone. One of the guards ran a bag-check room, taking my backpack before letting me into the sanctuary upstairs. I arrived in time to see Al Sharpton speaking Sunday-service style, with an organist providing flourishes to his address about MLK’s legacy in the days that lie ahead.

The population in attendance was the opposite of the Trump supporters I met that day, who had been overwhelmingly white. More than 2,000 people were present, most of them raising a hand and calling out in support of Sharpton’s words, and most of them Black. It occurred to me that Trump was being sworn for his second term in that very minute, almost two miles away.

Sharpton and Trump

Al Sharpton has been called an ambulance chaser and an opportunist across my entire adult life, and has disgraced and redeemed himself repeatedly through apology and action. Trump is not in the habit of apologizing to anyone and has revealed himself to be by far the greater opportunist.

“Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life,” the current president said not entirely truthfully in his inaugural address before declaring himself America’s messiah: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Born in New York City and entirely products of the best and worst extremes of postwar America, both men praised King’s legacy, yet their approaches were different. Trump spoke about unity and King, but then listed grievances against “millions and millions of criminal aliens” in the country, a number orders of magnitude larger than any set of criminal immigrants present in the U.S.

Trump declared that the government will exclude any government recognition of trans people, asserting “there are only two genders, male and female.” In one executive order he signed later in the day, he authorized stripping the birthright citizenship guaranteed in the constitution.

Sharpton, on the other hand, spoke about those whom the new administration had set itself against. “The same people who don’t like black people don’t like brown people, and don’t like gays,” he said. “We’ve got to fight this enemy together.”

He reminded those in attendance that by being present in that church, they stood on the same rock that “sent Frederick Douglass home” and had held watch over the coffin of Rosa Parks, too. “This is sacred ground. Trump ain’t nothing but a test.”

Trump likewise used battle language to talk about the days that lie ahead, “We will not be conquered. We will not be intimidated. We will not be broken. And we will not fail.”

But the key difference was that Sharpton was talking about fighting back to ensure survival. “I ain’t trying to go to the moon, I’m trying to live right here,” he said to a rapt audience, later encouraging the crowd not to embrace violence or become like those they were fighting.

Trump is now the most powerful man in the most powerful country in the history of the planet. Other than the nation of Panama, which Trump has threatened with false statements about the canal he would like to seize, or Greenland or Canada—all invented battles—who is Trump really fighting against? Those who recognize more than two genders, those who want race to be part of public conversation and accountability, anyone who opposes his administration. Along with those U.S. citizens he has decided will no longer have citizenship.

It was a vision of two Americas, one hopeful about including everyone inside its borders, the other punitive and exclusive. For now, the latter is in power.

Most of the smattering of protesters I’d seen in the downtown core weren’t in town to support any politician but were instead religious activists wandering the streets, calling on the country to repent. After running into more of them not far from where Sharpton spoke, I headed toward Farragut Square.

Four people walked by me in the street, carrying signs made out of torn-up cardboard boxes and magic marker. I turned and caught them. They were all students from the University of Maryland and had planned to visit the gathering in Malcolm X Park, away from the official events. But they also wanted to come down to where those events would happen, to see what was going on and for their own small protest.

One of them, Cecilia, held a sign saying “Resist Fascism.” Some of them were concerned about abortion rights and the treatment of women in general. They had not known what to do that day in the face of Trump, but they felt that they ought to do something.

One carried a sign quoting Dr. King, which read, “Freedom must be demanded by the Oppressed.” Another explained to me, “There has been a radical centralization of power. Never before has government been more up for sale. There’s an oligarchy forming that we have to protect ourselves against and act against. We need to build a community to act.”

Back home, listening to Trump’s inaugural address after the fact, I realized that the Trump followers all across the morning had parroted his talking points from the speech exactly, before it had even been given.

I’d talked to some people for just a minute or two, and others for as long as fifteen minutes. But other than the woman on the metro discussing about her Mexican friend, who had such difficulty for years and years trying to follow the law to get U.S. citizenship, not one person spoke to me in language that seemed to be their own or to involve any actual thought process. And even she, in the end, overrode her own thinking and experience by declaring that it was still more important to close the border.

The executive orders

Trump is following through on all the things his supporters had parroted to me, all the things he had told them mattered. He’s going to try removing not just birthright citizenship but also trans people from official life. “Drill baby drill” is official policy now, too, though we shouldn’t lose sight of the many quieter but practical orders like plans to strip price reductions for medicines and the demolition of green energy programs.

There are many orders; I won’t address them all here. But I want to talk about one part of what Trump did yesterday, which was to lift up and pardon the January 6 rioters and coup plotters, who had abetted in the attempt to overthrow the government. He wants prisoners released and current cases shelved. Some of these things are already underway.

Back in 2017, I talked to Chris Hayes about a time, a year into Hitler’s rule in Germany, when state’s attorneys still sometimes tried to take action based on the law. Some two dozen paramilitary concentration camp guards were charged with torturing detainees in clearly illegal acts. They were sentenced in 1935.

Hitler pardoned them. Soon, these kinds of cases would no longer be brought at all. The message had been received.

In the wake of yesterday’s pardons in Washington, DC, even the more independent attorneys remaining at the Department of Justice will likewise be less willing to push for charges in many kinds of cases. And the Department as a whole will now be working hand in glove with an administration more likely to commit civil rights violations than to act against them.

But unlike in 1934 Germany, we can make sure this kind of mistreatment doesn’t go unreported, unpublicized or unnoticed. It’s worth underlining all these actions publicly.

The takeaway

The more disturbing things that people said to me yesterday were, for the most part, statements they weren’t willing to make on camera. Most often they alluded vaguely to feeling hatred in a country divided due to wokeness. They clearly believe they’ve been victimized and that Trump will restore an America in which they won’t have to feel bad about anything. Still, on some level, they know their reasoning is dodgy and something to which they shouldn’t attach themselves publicly.

My sense is that we should tackle this from two directions. One is to engage in the democratic process at a community level. If—as in the case of the lawyer I met on the metro yesterday—a reactionary type pushing parental notification in schools decides to run for his board of education, some people who actually want to protect the kids should be out there running against him. Let the community hear both voices at the very least. Make people who advance these policies address what the real goals are and say what the outcomes will be. In the best case scenario, you will sometimes even win the seat to replace that guy.

The other direction to go is to be a gadfly at every level. If you can’t stop the agenda, you can slow it down and be annoying. You can make sure nothing happens easily. You can help wear out the bad actors.

For now, I’d like to think that the empty corporate core of the city and the abandonment of the National Mall yesterday were a sign of not just the cold but also of negative participation, of the real heart of DC and its communities steering clear of the mess, refusing to go where Trump wants them to, and not showing up on the streets where he might be. The real city held its own memorial—including its own protests—elsewhere yesterday.

So much of history, even the last election, is comprised of events that easily could have gone either way. The same is true of the future. The arc the past draws in the wake of the present is made clear only in hindsight. It’s up to us to create it every day out of the things we do.

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