I've Never Seen Washingtonians So Scared

One day in early 1991, I went to watch a punk band play in front of the White House at a protest of the impending first Gulf War. I borrowed my parents’ Plymouth Voyager and drove down with friends, parking at a metered spot on Pennsylvania Avenue just outside the executive mansion. For 17-year-olds, it seemed kind of cool, like we were sticking it to the man. What it didn’t seem was dangerous — for us, or for the leader of the free world. In those days, you could rally against the president’s policies and still stow your minivan right in front of his house.

At that point, Washington was actually most of the way through a century defined by steadily rising security barriers. Before World War II, downtown office workers could stroll right onto the White House grounds and eat lunch on the lawn. After 9/11, the city was permanently full of jersey barriers and fortified exteriors and ID checks at even the dinkiest government buildings. And the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, closed to traffic since the Oklahoma City bombing, was most definitely not available for parking.

What’s amazing to think about today is that all of this armoring actually predates our current age of bad feelings. In 2024, Washington’s sense of unease doesn’t come from foreign terrorists or obscure ideologies or monomaniacal presidential stalkers. It comes from particularly unhinged participants in the otherwise mainstream acrimony between America’s left and right. For all the headlines, though, the physical layout of the place hasn’t especially changed since our politics went sideways: There isn’t all that much physical infrastructure left to harden.

Instead, the story of the capital in the last decade is more like a tale of steadily disintegrating mental security barriers.

I’ve covered my hometown for most of my professional career, and what’s been striking to me is the steadily increasing number of conversations where folks tell me they’ve been worried for their safety because of politics.

That’s a remarkable change. The old knock on the capital was that it was boring. Washington may have enacted policies that affected life and death, but the workaday participants in its major industry felt largely insulated from the impact. You might worry that a career here would make you a dullard, but you knew it wouldn’t make you a target.

The path from the placid old political world to the fretful new one is dotted with horrific milestones, culminating in last Saturday’s near-miss assassination attempt against Donald Trump. The shootings of U.S. Reps. Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise in 2011 and 2017. The mail bombs sent to media outlets and top Democrats in 2018. The 2020 kidnapping plot targeting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The 2022 arrest of a gunman outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That same year’s hammer attack against the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But in wondering where we go from here after the shock shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, I’ve found myself thinking about less spectacular stair-steps on the path into fear. Much more than the actual crimes, they explain the current mood.

As a string of historians have reminded us, political violence is not exactly new to the country that martyred Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Yet those crimes came and went without the rest of the permanent federal city feeling a perpetual sense of fear. What’s different right now, I think, is that the headline-grabbing assaults coexist with more mundane erosions of norms around the same theme.

Take language. For ages, politicians have perhaps unwittingly used martial analogies, right down to Joe Biden’s suggestion that Democrats quit fighting over his nomination and instead put a “bullseye” on Trump. But in the 45th and possibly 47th president, America has a leading political figure of unprecedented rhetorical violence. He talked about a “blood bath” if he doesn’t win. He suggested retired Gen. Mark Milley deserves execution. He amplified a social media post accusing Republican critic Liz Cheney of “treason” and calling for her to face a military tribunal. He’s made reference to enemies as “vermin” and said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Does Trump mean it more than any of the others? His defenders say no, it’s just the rhetorical style of someone trained outside professional politics. But people know it only takes one person to interpret things literally. And the past few years have offered a lot more than one example.

Some Trump critics have blasted through norms of their own, less noxious but still telling. The last decade has seen a frenzy of political protests at the personal homes of public officials, shattering the old convention where Washington allowed even partisan big shots to be civilians when they were home with their families. The highest-profile examples of this trend have involved protesters from the left showing up at the homes of conservative figures like Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham or Tucker Carlson — and, after the October 7 attacks, the homes of perceived Biden administration Israel allies like Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

To the protesters, the old kid-glove rules of engagement seemed like entitlement. Their protests were peaceful, they said. It’s a free country. According to this logic, who cares if a bunch of well-protected insiders wrongly felt intimidated?

But when it comes to intimidation, two can play at that game. During the pandemic, the mostly conservative protesters against lockdown began showing up at the homes of minor public officials across the country, people like the state epidemiologist of Utah, the president of the Fresno City Council or the Ohio government’s health director. This being a free country, sometimes the marchers had guns .

Especially in a city like Washington, where so many people work on public policy, the net effect when you combine these minor spectacles with the major acts of violence is a sense that we are all combatants now, whether we’re at home or at work, whether we’re big shots or nobodies.

That was true even on the day when the chaos came closest to actual power. Though the import of Jan. 6 is as an attempt to violently disrupt the constitutional functioning of government, a lot of the most jaw-dropping later revelations involved the insurrectionists’ treatment of the Washington working stiffs who were on the job that day: The police who were beaten and called the n-word, the staffers who huddled for their lives.

Yes, staff have always risked being collateral damage of political violence. A Washington cop, a Secret Service officer and the presidential spokesman were shot alongside Ronald Reagan in 1981. But they weren’t targets. Looking at video of the fury with which the rioters confronted the anonymous workforce of the Hill, you get the sense of why a lot of Washington types on all political sides might worry that they’re potential prey and not just potential bystanders.

That’s true even if we’re just out leading nerdy Washington lives. In 2019, white nationalists marched on a Connecticut Avenue bookstore hosting a reading of a book about racial resentment. A few years earlier, a pizza and pingpong place on the same block was assaulted by a gunman who subscribed to a bizarre conspiracy theory saying the restaurant was an epicenter of child trafficking by Democratic political elites. Maybe it was just internet-era craziness, but in a culture accustomed to being safe from politics, it was disturbing all the same.

In the nature of our politics, the tendency when faced with this ignoble history is to try to adjudicate responsibility. Is it MAGA’s fault? Antifa’s? It’s a thankless exercise, even if you’re acting in good faith. Calling out a faction manifestly doesn’t change its behavior.

Instead, as the FBI and Homeland Security warn of possible retaliatory attacks following the Trump shooting, I think the better question is: What does this mood do to the functioning of a society?

So far, the specific security-focused new policy ideas are more likely to upset civil libertarians than traffic engineers. There have been calls for prosecuting people who protest at the homes of federal judges, successful local efforts (including in liberal municipalities like Los Angeles) to criminalize home protests, and legislation requiring members of Congress to get special security that whisks them through airports out of public view.

Other than that, as the aftermath of the shooting showed, the mood has mainly just amped up Washington’s already ravenous appetite for finger-pointing.

Ultimately, the graybeards of American politics may have less wisdom to offer than folks who’ve focused their work on more distant places. John Paul Lederach, a Notre Dame professor whose work draws on his experience in conflict zones like Northern Ireland, Somalia and Colombia, likened ambient fear to a system that produces specific outcomes.

“The most significant outcome that it produces is paralysis,” Lederach told me. “People aren't sure what steps to take, so they pull back. And that paralysis then translates into very slow responses to things that are fairly urgent — and then that diminishes the trust in those institutions.”

That listlessness is not a response most Beltway lifers would cop to. Bureaucrats still go to work; reporters still report; politicos still do political battle. But there was an echo of it in a couple of blind quotes from Democratic members of Congress that appeared in Axios this week. Asked about the faltering efforts to push Biden off the ticket, a member said that, after the shooting, “We’re all just focused on expressing condolences ... and keeping our teams safe.” Another called the moment too “chaotic” for leadership battles.

Could this be true? Or is it just a convenient rationale from someone who wants to avoid a difficult issue, the way bad weather or the flu might be for occupants of a less fraught capital?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Anxiety about political violence and its aftermath is a plausible excuse in today’s Washington. Which represents a much bigger change than the closing of a city street.