Donald Trump campaign signs were rarer than a rainstorm in the drought-plagued nation’s capital over the past month.
The District has a special disdain for Mr. Trump, delivering him less than 19,000 of its 277,000 votes — about 7%. Although paltry, his D.C. total was up about 2 percentage points compared with 2020.
“This is a Democratic stronghold, and they don’t like him,” said Chuck Thies, a local political consultant, adding that residents also did not like Republican President George W. Bush until Sept. 11, 2001, unified the nation. “Is their disdain for him unprecedented? Yes.”
Yet it will be Mr. Trump standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office on Jan. 20, four years after a pro-Trump mob stormed up the same steps in its assault to halt the Electoral College vote count.
Mr. Trump will then proceed down to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where he was voted to have four more years at the center of the city that loves to hate him.
Mr. Trump says he has big plans for his once-and-future temporary home, a city that he says has deteriorated into a cesspool of crime, homelessness and corruption without him at the nation’s helm.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump told supporters that they risked getting mugged if they tried to visit the national monuments and suggested the federal government would “take over” the city’s operations.
“An important part of my platform for president is to bring back, restore, and rebuild Washington D.C. into the ‘crown jewel’ of the nation,” Mr. Trump said on social media earlier this year. “We will make it crime-free and great again.”
Some city leaders aren’t eager for what Mr. Trump has to offer.
“During his first term as president, Trump considered federalizing D.C.’s police force for his own purposes,” said Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s nonvoting member of Congress, in a statement about Mr. Trump’s election.
She said the city lacks protections because of its status as a federal district instead of a full-fledged state.
“As we enter into a second Trump presidency, it’s worth observing that D.C. residents, who pay the highest federal taxes per capita in the nation and have fought and died in every war since the Revolution, deserve full representation in Congress are worthy and capable of the same self-government as residents of the states,” she said.
With the GOP controlling the Senate and the White House, the city’s hopes of statehood are almost certainly on hold.
Instead, the District is likely to battle congressional Republicans on a variety of issues including local abortion laws to crime rates to the future of the region’s pro sports teams.
“Now that’s not an easy needle to thread because this city has consistently, now three times, voted overwhelmingly against Donald Trump, and that puts [Mayor Muriel Bowser] in a difficult position,” Mr. Theis said. “So she’s going to have to identify the things that she’s willing to concede during negotiations and hills on which she’s willing to die.”
Mr. Theis, however, stressed that Ms. Bowser will look to find common ground with Mr. Trump like she did when she traveled to meet him at Trump Tower after his first win in 2016.
D.C.’s antipathy to Mr. Trump is on another level, even among deep-blue Democratic areas. Massachusetts and Hawaii mustered about 60% support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
San Francisco, the poster child for a left-wing city, delivered about 80% of its vote to Ms. Harris, who cut her political teeth in the city. The same was true of Manhattan. Boston and Denver were both in the high-70s for the Democrat.
But D.C. gave her more than 90% of its vote. And it doesn’t change much outside the city limits. Prince George’s County, to the city’s east in Maryland, gave Ms. Harris about 86% of its vote. Montgomery County, to the northwest, delivered about 72% for her.
Across the Potomac River in Virginia, Arlington County and the city of Alexandria — which occupy territory that used to be part of the district — backed Ms. Harris by 79% and 77%, respectively.
Still, those results are all improvements for Mr. Trump, who did even worse in those jurisdictions against Mr. Biden in 2020.
The region is home to more than 400,000 federal civilian workers, including about 160,000 in the District. Mr. Trump has proposed eliminating civil-service protections for federal employees, a move that would be a major flash point locally in his second term.
Residents in the D.C. region went out of their way to clash with Mr. Trump’s team during his first term. That included dogging administration figures when they were out and about in the city.
It creates a sort of bunker mentality for Mr. Trump’s few local fans.
“There’s a very low probability, as I live my life in D.C., that I am talking to somebody that, I guess, sees the way that I do,” said one supporter, a 29-year-old White businessman, who requested anonymity.
“But that also is just in D.C., right?” he said. “D.C. is such a strange place in that you’re never really talking to people that grew up here. It’s all transplants, and the reason that they came here is, you know, to work for the federal government.”
John Feehery, a D.C.-based GOP strategist, hopes Mr. Trump will use whatever tools are available to him to “Make Washington great again.”
“Since he has left, the town has literally gone down the tubes, and while a number of people will continue to be opposed to him and his administration, a number of others will embrace his ideas of ridding the city of crime and corruption,” Mr. Feehery said. “It is pretty clear that the radicals who run D.C. have no earthly idea of how to crack down on crime.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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