Goodbye Obama, hello Trump
WASHI NGTON • Gail Peck bought a purple pantsuit on election day. She planned to wear it out that night to celebrate what she thought would be Hillary Clinton’s easy win. Instead, she ended up — pantsuit on — curled up in her Maryland home “f eeling absolutely sick” about the actual result. “It was horrible,” she said. Even now, on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Peck still hasn’t come to terms with his shocking win. “I can hardly talk to someone for five minutes without, you know, reverting to the fact that we’re basically screwed,” she said.
But on Thursday, she put that aside, briefly. Early that morning she stood outside the White House, past the fences and the lawns, and held up a sign aimed at the residents within. “Hope lives,” it read.
Her friend Nina Corin had one too — black letters on a big pink heart. “We the people & President Obama,” it said, “4 ever.”
Thursday was a kind of bridge day between worlds in Washington, D.C. On Barack Obama’s last full day in office, some of his fans sought to say goodbye, and thanks, while nearby tens of thousands of Trump supporters gathered to celebrate his impending coronation.
The result was an uneasy mix of competing events and competing realities, as two different Americas, divorced from each other in style and belief, shared the same physical space.
Washington is a heavily Democratic town. But most federal employees were given Thursday and Friday off. So instead of angry and worried civil servants, the city core was packed Thursday with student groups, inauguration tourists and early-bird protesters.
Just outside the Washington Monument, Charlotte Harris, a teacher from Houston, Texas, walked briskly in front of her group. She wore an Obama toque and said she felt “heartache” about the end of his presidency.
“I don’ t think Obama (got) the credit he deserved,” she said .“He didn’t get the respect that he deserved. I see all these people that have respect for the incoming president who just completely looked down and talked bad about Obama.”
Asked how she felt about Trump, she paused and replied: “I’m just going to say no comment.”
All week, across D. C ., competing pro- and anti-Trump events are scheduled. Thursday night, a sold- out “Thanks, Obama rally” went to head to head with the first of several “Deploraballs” — parties for Trump’s Internet army.
In the afternoon, as supporters of Saturday’s scheduled Women’s March began arriving in town, a Make America Great Again concert kicked off near the Lincoln Memorial.
Just outside the concert, at about 2 p.m ., Kier an Mclean walked quickly through the crowds relaxing near the reflecting pool. He held up a sign that said ‘ This Is F----d Up” on one side and “No Muslim Registry” on the other.
Mclean went mostly unmolested until he reached the end of the pool. He stopped there and held the sign up — f--k side out — toward a hill thick with lounging Trump fans.
The chants started first: U.S. A .! U.S. A .! and Trump! Trump! Trump! Then a woman in a Trump toque stepped in front of Mclean and unfurled an American flag. A large man joined her, pushing his Trump cap in front of the sign. A teenager dressed as Benjamin Franklin added his tricorn to the blockade, and then the flood really began.
Trump supporters penned Mclean back near the edge of the pool, arguing with him, yelling at him. Eventually, a man in a leather jacket strode up and used his cane to knock the sign from Mclean’s hands. He got it back, briefly, before another young man came running in. He grabbed the sign, ran away, and tossed it in the pool.
Nearby, a reveller snoozed, oblivious, sheltered beneath a Donald Trump flag.
The confrontation with Mclean was a brief break in what seemed, for most of the city, if not a truce, then at least a refusal to physically acknowledge the other side. All the grief and joy and anger in America this year seems to exist here in a paler form. Everything is bleached somehow. The run-ins, even where the partisans crossed paths, were few and mostly gentle.
All day outside the White House, Trump fans from across the U.S. posed in red hats and Trump flags next to Obama supporters with thank you signs. They were two solitudes leaning on a single fence, mixing perky joy with outright sorrow. At about noon, J.T. Creedon, from Las Vegas, unfolded a single sheet paper of paper. It had “Please Don’t Go” written by hand on one side.
Creedon volunteered for Obama in 2008 after watching his victory speech in the Iowa caucuses on TV. He hasn’t quite accepted yet that Obama’s presidency is over. He can’t quite believe it’s real. “I don’t think there will ever be another person in my lifetime that has the same impact, or that I feel the same connection with,” he said.
“This guy is the American Dream.”