I just got back from a short trip to our nation’s capital. This was a sight-seeing, pleasure trip with my son who will be off to college (Gig ’em, Aggies!) in a week. Anywho, I thought I’d share a few observations from my perspective as a red-stater from a small city.

Upon our arrival, we were greeted with the street message shown here. A passenger on the subway from the airport to our hotel was wearing a t-shirt with a nude Melania Trump who was using her hand to cover only her southern regions. The t-shirt contained a profane message about Trump.

The vibe in DC is definitely of a “We hate Trump” variety. Remember, 93 percent of the votes in the District went to Clinton. DC is full of imposing, sprawling buildings marked with words such as “Treasury,” “Commerce,” and “Justice.” The idea that these buildings are 93 percent full of your opponent’s voters, some of whom are looney-crazy “resistance fighters,” is a sobering thought.

To me, the White House took on the aura of a besieged fortress rather than the residence of a democratically elected official. It was assumed by everyone we met that we hated Trump too. It felt like being in middle school where no dissent from the in-crowd’s opinion would be tolerated if you wanted in with the cool kids. I certainly smiled and nodded and said nothing to our Lyft drivers, Segway tour guide, multiple wait staff and assorted others rather than offer an alternate take, no matter how small, on the POTUS.^  Of course, where I’m from, a host (or guest) never brings up matters of religion or politics, but many people in DC apparently were not brought up this way.

^Here, I insert that necessary disclaimer that our President’s crassness grates on me, but it’s the economy and national security strides that will keep me a Trump voter in the next election. Living as close to Arkansas as I do, I can say that nearly everyone I know despises HRC, often based on personal interactions. A nasty woman indeed.  

By happenstance, my son and I were in DC at the same time as the Unite the Right rally and preparations. We had no idea what was going on at first. Our Metro line was shut down at 10:30 Saturday night and the police swarmed the station and declared it the last stop and shoo-ed us and the other riders to street level at the Federal Triangle to take a shuttle bus to Foggy Bottom, where we were staying.

As we were boarding the shuttle, I spied three black-clad, masked adults — two male and one female — walking across the street carrying shovel handles. A black passenger on our bus saw them too and exclaimed: “Who the [expletive] is that?!” It was clear that he did not find them to be brothers-in-arms. It is quite unnerving to see masked adults walking the street with weapons capable of bludgeoning you.

The Trump Hotel is across from the Federal Triangle Metro stop. The hotel was already surrounded by metal fence panels designed for crowd control on Saturday night and all entry/exit from the hotel was funneled into one door. Police were positioned everywhere on Saturday night and their presence was intensified on Sunday.

There were four eight-passenger vans, filled with blue-uniformed police, parked at the Foggy Bottom Metro station on Sunday morning. That’s 24 policemen who were just sitting in idling vans with the AC on, blocks and hours away from the planned demonstration, waiting for the call. The police presence on Pennsylvania Avenue near Freedom Plaza and the Trump Hotel was five times that amount.  Bicycle cops, motorcycle cops, and 12 eight-passenger vans filled with police were just standing by. This is in addition to those police already on the streets. I shudder to think of the overtime and the cost of the mobilization of so much manpower.

We saw several more black-clad, often mask-wearing, counter-protestors and many more “regular” people headed to the counter-protest location with homemade signs. We never saw any actual UTR demonstrators. I understand that the permit requested by UTR was for 400 demonstrators and the total in attendance was closer to two dozen. It certainly appeared to me that this was a huge to-do about nothing.

Our Lyft driver on Sunday was of some non-white ethnicity. We discussed the rally because several streets had been shut down, forcing him to take alternate routes. I asked him if it wouldn’t be better to let the police put a perimeter around Lafayette Park and let the UTR people shout in the air and shake their fists at no one and have the city offer a collective “yawn” rather than to play up the situation and infuse the UTR group with attention and power that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

The driver seemed to have never considered this take before, but given the NPR station playing in his car, I’m guessing histrionics were more on the menu than dismissal of UTR by indifference. My son and I then went to the airport that evening to fly out and CNN was on the airport TVs, covering the “demonstration” wall-to-wall. Just like today’s Babylon Bee’s hot-take suggested, I have never seen a news organization practically beg for and salivate over the possibility of violent clashes and portray the demonstration on TV as far more than really existed.

On a different note (and a nice palate cleanser), the vacation season was in full swing in DC and the tourist throng was made up of American families from all over and lots of foreign visitors — French, Chinese, Indian, etc. Everyone was pleasant and having a nice time. My son and I sat next to a French family during a film on D-Day at the IMAX in the Air and Space Museum. I’m a history geek and no matter how much I re-visit D-Day, it always seems unbelievable what the Allies pulled off that day and the days that followed.

At the conclusion of the film, the French dad told me how his father spoke so warmly of the Americans who liberated France. I told the fellow that my grandfather had served in WW2 and I hoped he knew that there was still another America out there and we weren’t the sum of our president, our politics, or what the news media portrayed. He chuckled and said he did know that, but it was easy to forget with the news coverage he gets at home. He said that the D-Day film was a nice reminder of that other America. And it is.