A night view of the main entrance to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. : Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — So it’s been two weeks since I arrived back in the nation’s capital, right on time to visit the federal district courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland just north of D.C. where one of the trials of the century — or maybe the millennium — will take place.

I’ve already covered a few routine stories, but the spring weather has been so nice that until now I’ve not taken the time to sit down at the computer inside to do some serious writing. It’s warming up now on the Saturday before Father’s Day. The weather men on local television news say we are in for a three day heat wave, defined as three days in a row when the high temperature rises above 90 degrees. There’s a blues festival going on today not far from here in Silver Spring. But I’m too tired from all the long walks with the dog and bike rides over the past two weeks to deal with the crowd.

For inspiration I’m scanning back through some passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, thinking it might help me with the pacing of writing about the inevitable downfall of President Donald J. Trump. I figure if one of the most insightful writers to ever tackle American politics with a head full of mescaline, a case of Bass Ale, a gallon of Wild Turkey and an ounce of sinsemilla can cover Nixon’s downfall due to the Watergate scandal from the Watergate Hotel, where better to witness Trump’s downfall than the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, only a couple of blocks from the White House?

Thompson only had a couple of IBM selectric typewriters, an analogue TV and a land line phone by the pool. Now we have cell phones, computers and the internet. This is a much easier job now, although we don’t get paid as much.

Since revealing this plan on Facebook, I’ve already had one phone call from a very astute friend on the left berating me for even having the gall to spend money in the Trump palace. But it’s not like I sprung for the $110 porterhouse steak. The point was to sip a couple of $10 IPA’s and see what I could see, who I could meet, and get a feel for the place. I doubt if there’s a self respecting beat reporter for what’s left of this town’s newspapers who ever had the idea just to hang out here and see who’s frequenting the Benjamin Lounge.

The name is inspired by Benjamin Franklin, an idea I have no doubt was not Trump’s. Maybe his daughter Ivanka thought it would be a quaint idea to name the bar after one of the smartest politicians in American history, hoping some of that brain power might somehow enter Trump’s persona by some kind of strange historical osmosis. Or perhaps she knew it would impress Trump’s fans from Alabama, who come here just to gawk at the place after buying their Make America Great Again caps from the so-called White House Gift Shop, a private store right across from the White House on 15th Street.

I had the idea last year to hang out here when I was camping in The Swamp for five months. Never got around to it. Before I forget to tell you how it came about and I get back to making the point of the story explicit, here are the facts and nothing but the facts.

For the first three weeks of this trip, I’m house sitting for a couple of friends in the Berwyn neighborhood of College Park while they vacation on a beach in North Carolina and then visit family in Birmingham, Mobile and Auburn. It’s a great neighborhood with lots of big, old trees and lots of birds, which almost drown out the traffic noise from Greenbelt Road, Baltimore Avenue and the Metro train tracks just a few blocks from here. There’s a great little beer store in walking distance and a bike and walking trail just two blocks away.

From the house you can get to the College Park Metro Station in about 30 minutes on foot, 10 minutes on a bike. Once on the train you can be at the National Archives stop near the White House in 15 or 20 minutes.

The Greenbelt station is about the same distance away northeast, the end of the Green line. When I found out the other day that the federal courthouse is right near there, I took the bike in that direction just to get some photos and so I will know where to go when the next hearing takes place in the big trial. It was an easy jaunt from there to the Metro and, with the newer cars, they don’t even make you take your bike to the back of the train anymore and you can take it on during rush hour.

From the Archives stop, it was just a matter of riding the bike over to the hotel and finding a place to lock up. As it happens — and this is one of those insights you can’t really get depending on Google, the Washington Post or your phone map — the nearest bike rack is behind the hotel across from the Starbucks. Right in front of the IRS office, conveniently located for the massive staff it must be taking to audit Trump’s tax returns.

A view of the Benjamin Lounge in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

Out of sheer serendipity, when there was no seat at the bar, I was invited to sit down at a table by a Trump supporter from Virginia, a woman who later got her picture taken with Rudy Giuliani. I sat across from a Jewish woman from Buffalo, New York, who is no fan of Trump. In fact she’s something of an activist and will talk to you all day long about the problems with his politics. It may seem strange, but she likes to go to the hotel bar to see who’s there. She vowed to let me know if she ever sees Steve Bannon. I will go back for that with the Flip cam.

Amazingly, when I mentioned we have a new Senator in Washington from Alabama, she immediately came up in her seat and blurted out: “Doug Jones.” She knew all about the special election campaign. I was surprised by that since in my experience more people know the name Judge Roy Moore. It was the sex scandal that made the campaign famous all over the country.

When I told her I’m the one who broke the story about Moore being banned from the Gadsden Mall, which was cited and linked in The New Yorker and flashed on the Colbert show on CBS, she said that’s the story that clinched it and cost Moore the election and put Jones over the top. Of course there were many factors at work, just like there are many reasons Trump was elected. But if in her mind that’s the story that did it, it’s probably true for a lot of people who voted in that election too.

Trump lawyer and former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuiliani hanging out with the tourists in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Seen here with Rebecca Seekford of Arlington, Virginia.

Here’s another insight a writer can only get by going to a place. A burger here costs $24. They call it chef David Burke’s “dry aged burger with aged cheddar,” and it comes with steakhouse mayo and fries. Trump, who says his favorite meal is a hamburger, could have this for dinner every night delivered for free to the White House two blocks from here — or up in his suite on the top floor of the hotel in the old U.S. post office building where he really sleeps most nights, some say. It cost a goddamned fortune to make it secure and the Secret Service has an entire floor here to keep the president safe. Instead, most nights Trump orders out for a $3.99 Big Mac from the local McDonalds, which he allegedly eats in bed while watching HuLu reruns of Fox and Friends, mainly the episodes on which he appears on the phone, making a total fool out of himself.

“Look, baby, that’s me on TV?”

His brain is so addled from all the badly cut cocaine over the years that he doesn’t know the difference between making a fool out of one’s self and appearing on TV. As long as they are talking about him, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, or so he thinks. That might have worked to impress as long as he was just a presidential wannabe, hawking his TV shows and golf courses to Russian oligarchs and prostitutes and the occasional Ms. America or an American stripper and porn star like Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels.

What he doesn’t seem to get is that there are so many investigations and lawsuits about to come down on his head that there’s no way he can escape unscathed. He is as doomed as Richard Nixon, but he literally believes he will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for meeting with a dictator in North Korea and talking about peace. It won’t happen, either peace or the prize. But he believes it because every news outfit in the land put it on the web and TeeVee, and his supporters cheer about it in places like the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, where Trump came to campaign for reelection recently while skipping the White House Correspondents dinner. The place he chose is called “Total Sports Park,” and it’s fitting that seeing Trump in person is sort of like a sport, a game show from the next episode of the Netflix series Idiocracy, when they get around to doing the remake.

Here’s the kicker, and key insight I’ve had from this trip so far. My friends on Facebook will not like me saying it, but a reporter has to have the freedom to call it like he sees it, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? There’s no creative thought in newspapers anymore, and working for what’s left of the magazines must be like being a bureaucrat for the NSA. They probably count your keystrokes to make sure you are meeting your quota of cranking out drivel for the masses for the measly paychecks the corporate news chains cut to create the semblance that they are still practicing journalism in a democracy. Let me just say this and the consequences be damned.

Donald Trump is the quintessential American president of our time. Just to make E.B. White happy in his grave, let me say it another way. He is the “most perfect or typical example of a quality or class,” the perfect president for America, where a third of the population are still racist bigots and another third are raging liberals who do not vote. Remember the white riot in Portland, Oregon right after Trump’s election by a bunch of white people who admitted they didn’t vote?

America deserves Donald Trump. He’s raw, brash and full of himself, just like most Americans. At least the men. Europeans have been making fun of us since George Washington. They are really having fun now.

Just look at the court case of Larry Harmon, the vet in Ohio who recently sued because he tried to vote in a 2015 ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and found that his name had been stricken from the voting rolls. He didn’t vote in 2010, 2012 or 2014, he said because there was no option on the ballot for “none of the above.” The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld the Ohio law that purges the voting rolls when people don’t vote, which is causing all kinds of hand-wringing on Facebook and Twitter. The dude may have had a case, but the fact is he didn’t exercise his right to vote in three election cycles. The only thing that inspired him to show up to vote was to legalize pot?

Come on, people. Voting has been called the most sacred right in a democracy. But if you don’t exercise it, what good is it?

If any people should know this it’s black people in my home state of Alabama. It’s there that the fight for the right to vote made national news in the 1960s, leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But in the recent special election for U.S. Senate in which Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore, according to exit polls only 30 percent of REGISTERED African American voters bothered to show up and exercise their right. There’s no telling how many have still not bothered to register to vote in the first place. Many of those who did vote had to have a canvasser show up at their door and tell them there was an election coming up, when it was, where to vote, and who to vote for.

Maybe it would have helped even more to buy them breakfast (maybe not at the Waffle House) and give them a ride to the damn polls. This was hailed as a major achievement, and I guess it was considering that only 25 percent showed up to vote in 2008 for the first African American President Barack Obama. Only 15 percent showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. No wonder Trump won. Forget former FBI director James Comey. Trump won because people simply did not vote.

Yes, I know they think that perhaps they would have wasted their votes because all the white redneck union workers and the million Baptists were going to vote for Trump anyway. But Jesus freaking Christ, people. Like Huey Long used to tell the poor people of Louisiana: “If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.”

There’s another election coming up in November. There’s lots of big talk on Facebook about repeating the 40 percent turnout that got Doug Jones elected. Will more people turn out to vote? We will see, but there’s not much reason for optimism, considering the turnout in the recent primary election. Only 26 percent bothered to vote.

If that number is not much higher in November, Alabamians will deserve to get Kay Ivey as governor, at least for a few days or weeks. The word in political circles is her health is so bad the Republicans wish they could replace her on the ballot. Democratic insiders are talking about this. But it won’t happen before the election. The Republicans will role her out in a wheel chair like George Wallace if they have to to win.

Then after it’s all over, guess who gets to be governor? The Republican who will inevitably be elected Lt. Governor, Twinkle Cavanaugh, who will ascend to the throne just like Kay Ivey did when Robert Bentley was booted out in the sex scandal.

So for all my friends in Alabama, try this and get used to saying it. Hail to Governor Twinkle. Hail to Governor Twinkle. With any luck for the late night comics, Trump will still be clinging to office just in time to tweet about her. I can’t wait. Remember, you get what you deserve. Vote.

More Photos

The U.S. District Courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland: Glynn Wilson

The front entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

The doorman at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

A view of the Benjamin Lounge in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

A Washington D.C. Metro train on the tracks just north of the College Park Station: Glynn Wilson