Trump’s advisers endure public hecklers around the capital
WASHINGTON — Just after arriving in Washington to work for President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway found herself in a downtown supermarket, where a man rushing by with his shopping cart sneered, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!”
“Mirrors are in aisle 9 — I’ll go get one now,” Conway recalled replying. She brushed off the dart with the swagger of someone raised in the ever-attitudinal trenches of South Jersey. “What am I gonna do? Fall apart in the canned vegetable aisle?”
For any new presidential team, the challenges of adapting to Washington include navigating a capital with its own unceasing rhythms and high-pitched atmospherics, not to mention a maze of madness-inducing traffic circles.
Yet for employees of Donald J. Trump — the most singularly combative president of the modern era, a man who exists in his own tweet-driven ecosystem — the challenges are magnified exponentially, particularly in a predominantly Democratic city where he won only 4 percent of the vote.
For as long as the White House has existed, its star occupants have inspired a voluble mix of demonstrations, insults and satire. On occasion, protesters have besieged the homes of presidential underlings, such as Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist, who once looked out his living room window to find several hundred protesters on his lawn.
Yet what distinguishes the Trump era’s turbulence is the sheer number of his deputies — many of them largely anonymous before his inauguration — who have become the focus of planned and sometimes spontaneous public fury.
“Better be better!” a stranger shouted at Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser and the architect of his zero-tolerance immigration policy, as he walked through Dupont Circle a few months ago. Miller’s visage subsequently appeared on “Wanted” posters someone placed on lampposts ringing his City Center apartment building.
One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.
Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.
On Saturday, as Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, browsed at an antiquarian bookstore in Richmond, a woman in the shop called him a “piece of trash.” The woman left after Nick Cooke, owner of Black Swan Books, told her he would call the police.
Most of the interactions that Trump’s well-known aides have with strangers amount to nothing more than posing for selfies. But his advisers also have found themselves subjected to a string of embarrassing public spankings, a litany that began even before he took office.
More recently, Trump appointees have starred in a flurry of inyour-face encounters that ricochet around social media for days on end.
A week ago, it was a Sidwell Friends teacher who interrupted her lunch to tell Scott Pruitt that he should resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
By last Thursday morning, nearly half a million viewers had clicked on a video of the confrontation that the teacher, Kristin Mink, had posted on Facebook. By late Thursday afternoon, Pruitt quit.
“I would say it’s burning people out,” said Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director. “I just think there’s so much meanness, it’s causing some level of, ‘What do I need this for?’ And I think it’s a recruiting speed bump for the administration. To be part of it, you’ve got to deal with the incoming of some of this viciousness.”
After Mink, the schoolteacher, confronted Pruitt on Monday, television news shows sent chauffeur-driven cars to deliver her to their studios.
She did not appear to mind the attention.
After Pruitt resigned, she tweeted: “Hey @realDonaldTrump where are you going for lunch tomorrow?”