This DC Trip Hit Differently
Coming to terms with the reality, and hope for the future
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I‘ve been to Washington D.C. more times than I can count. I know the rhythms of this city — the bad coffee in green rooms, the Capitol hallways, the feeling of being rushed between meetings that feel important and probably aren’t. I’ve done the TV hits, the briefings, the dinners where everyone performs their version of themselves. I thought I knew what coming back here felt like.
I was wrong.
I was walking near the Capitol yesterday. Just walking. And I was hit with something I didn’t expect — a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with breakfast. I’ve been ignoring something for a long time, and this city decided it was done waiting for me to deal with it.
The people who laid siege to that building are now in charge of it.
That’s not a partisan talking point. That’s not rhetoric. It’s just true, and standing in the shadow of that dome, I had to finally let it land. I’ve been moving fast enough that I could keep it at arm’s length — the commentary, the interviews, the advocacy, always the next thing. But you can’t outrun a city. Washington doesn’t care how busy you’ve been. It just stands there, marble and memory, and makes you look.
And I looked. And I felt the anger.
I felt it fully, maybe for the first time. Not the pundit version of it. Not the version I’ve shaped into talking points. The real thing — the grief underneath the anger, the loss of something I’d given years of my life believing in. I stood there and I was furious, and I was sad, and honestly, I felt a little embarrassed that it took me this long to let myself feel it.
But here’s what else happened.
I kept walking.
And as I walked, the city started doing what this city does — it started telling you its other stories. Because Washington is not only the story of right now. It is the accumulated weight of every crisis this country has ever dragged itself through. Every wrong turn, every failure of imagination, every moment where the people who were supposed to hold the line didn’t.
Lincoln walked these streets carrying a country that was literally tearing itself apart. He could see the unfinished Capitol dome from the White House — they kept building it throughout the Civil War, as a statement of faith that there would still be something to finish it for. Vietnam protesters flooded the Mall convinced, with real justification, that the government had rotted from the inside. Watergate. The Red Scare. The centuries of injustices that forced every civil rights march that ever moved through these avenues.
And before all of that — Teddy Roosevelt was president here. And before that, men were enslaved here, in the shadow of the same monuments we photograph and put on postcards.
Every single one of those eras had people in it who were certain — certain — that this was the end. That the republic had finally hit the wall it couldn’t climb. That the damage was too deep.
They were wrong. Not because history is inevitably kind, but because people kept showing up anyway.
I’m not going to tell you everything is fine, because it isn’t. I’m not going to tell you that the threat isn’t real, because it is. I’ve spent years warning about exactly what’s happened, and I take no satisfaction in being right about any of it.
But I’ve also learned, standing in this strange and complicated city, that the American story has never been a straight line. It’s been an argument — a loud, sometimes violent, frequently maddening argument — about what we actually are and what we’re supposed to be. And the argument continues. It has always continued. The people who wanted it to stop have never managed to stop it for good.
The anger I felt walking past the Capitol? I’m keeping it. Anger, when you finally stop suppressing it, is clarifying. It tells you what you actually care about.
But I’m pairing it with something else now. Something I’d almost let go of in the exhaustion of the last few years.
This too shall pass.
Not because of fate. Not because America has some divine protection that other democracies don’t. But because of the people — the ones who always show up, who keep the argument going, who refuse to let the story end on somebody else’s terms.
Two hundred and fifty years. Every generation convinced it was the last test. And here we still are, arguing, imperfect, alive.
I needed this trip. I needed to feel what I’ve been avoiding. And I needed this old, heavy, complicated city to remind me that it’s survived worse hands than these.
So have we.
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