Donald Trump did it. Did what? He panicked in 2020 over the coronavirus, and downtown D.C. has yet to recover.
More than a few Trump-loving locals (yes, there are more than a few) know this to be true for a variety of reasons, most notably that the Trump Hotel was the Trump crowd’s hangout during his first term. It was also a destination for Trump-loving visitors.
Which means Trump-supporting locals and visitors who congregated at his formerly eponymous hotel are familiar with downtown D.C., and know what it was like up until March of 2020. It was booming, bustling, full of people and restaurants. The timeline is important since Muriel Bowser was elected Mayor of Washington, D.C. in 2014.
Which is just a comment that D.C.’s unquestionable decline doesn’t pencil with her leadership. Whether she’s been good or bad on policy (the experts can decide, one supposes), the D.C. that boomed from 2016 to 2020 as restaurants, apartments, condos and people proliferated does not correlate with President Trump’s assertion that its problems now are both recent, and manmade by those running the city.
More realistically, D.C.’s struggles can be directly tied to politicians panicking in 2020. This prominently includes then-President Trump. He was in the White House in March of 2020 when Washington, D.C. and U.S. cities across the country used economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class in 2020, and to help historians understand the monumental errors committed by Trump et al, I published When Politicians Panicked in March of 2021.
Once again, up until politicians panicked Washington, D.C. was heaving. Which is why Trump’s lockdown orders were so tragic.
Whereas downtown had formerly been heavily populated each day with commuters, suddenly it wasn’t. Private sector workers were told to stay at home, and as for federal workers, Trump not only supported the lockdowns, but subsequently signed into law a $3 trillion federal spending plan that would subsidize lockdowns for weeks and months into the future.
Washington, D.C. never recovered, only for President Biden to make it worse. Elected president arguably due to the sad fact that Trump panicked, Biden was a nailbiter himself. Forget that the federal government was paying enormous sums to rent out office space for federal workers throughout D.C., Biden would continue the fiction that said human beings were a threat to one another and needed to be kept apart. Which meant that a downtown already put on its back by Trump’s lockdowns grew sicker as the traditional daily population of D.C. replaced the office with the home, or the local library, or the proverbial Starbucks in the suburb.
The main thing is that this is what Trump returned to when he was re-elected. Washington, D.C. is bereft of people relative to how it was before the lockdowns in March of 2020, and the most conspicuous aspect of its office buildings is the advertisements reflecting empty floors and abundant office space. That the criminal element has replaced the worker element isn’t a surprise as much as it’s a statement of the obvious.
Is Trump’s deployment of the National Guard excess? Wise minds can debate the latter. What’s not debatable is why D.C. is such a wreck. It wasn’t this way during Trump’s first term as Trump voters and visitors alike can attest. Yes, Trump did this. The National Guard is Trump cleaning up his own mess.
