Donald Trump is coming back to the place he hated to call home.
The former president is due in the nation’s capital on Wednesday to address the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and will perhaps be collecting impressions for his next unflattering depiction of the city in a future campaign speech.
Washington – with its gun crime and carjackings – has taken a starring role in the GOP front-runner’s 2024 stump speech as he tries to create a dystopian picture of a nation and its citadel trapped in the grip of lawlessness that requires a strongman’s attention.
“You can’t walk down the streets of these cities these days without being shot or mugged or beat up or pushed into a subway train,” Trump said in a dark speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on January 20. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, DC, and clean it up, renovate it, rebuild it. It’ll be a capital like no other.”
Trump went on: “Our capital is a disgrace, I was there for one of these fake trials the other day a couple of weeks ago, and I’m driving down a major thoroughfare … and there was so much garbage that we were literally driving over cartons and boxes and cans of beer.” The former president was exaggerating the city’s current state, even though it does have its problems, especially since the pandemic.
Trump has returned several times since his disgraced departure from the District as president in January 2021, when the US Capitol still bore the scars of his supporters’ mob invasion.
He’s not been much missed in this overwhelmingly Democratic bastion. And the feeling is mutual. The ex-president has never hidden his disgust for the city where he slept – or tweeted late into the night – for parts of four years when he was the commander in…
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