The restaurant at the new Trump International Hotel in Washington wasn’t empty on Thursday night. But it wasn’t full either. The handful of diners could look down on the marbled lobby and bar and see four TVs: two tuned to American football, one to basketball and a fourth to conservative Fox News – including election ads for the final days of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
“The style is jubilant,” said Dominic Vorv, 50, a lawyer with a cowboy hat who dined on ribeye steak as banal pop music wafted through the former post office. “My clients are impressed. My voice does not reverberate here because it’s a large place. You can talk and no one listens to your business to find out: are you a Republican, are you a Democrat?”
The glitzy hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue stands 723 short steps from the White House. Vorv, a Latino from New Mexico who says his legal clients include strippers, hopes that Trump will add the Oval Office to his portfolio on Tuesday. “The city has been waiting for a leader,” he said. “All we get is politicians.”
Washington has been home to every US president since John Adams, the second president, in 1800. He and his successors have variously embraced the city or seldom ventured beyond the mansion grounds. George W Bush was rarely seen out at night, whereas Barack Obama has helped DC unbutton its collar. So how would Trump or Hillary Clinton fit in?
Politically, at least, one would feel right at home while the other would be a square peg in a round hole. Nine in 10 residents of the District of Columbia vote Democratic. “Trump would be at war with the city and the population of the city,” said one party stalwart, who did not wish to be named. “This would be an occupied capital. People in Washington would be regarded as Parisians under the Nazis, with fewer collaborators.”
Culturally, it is less certain how Washington would reflect the personality of either would-be commander-in-chief. The brash New York businessman’s travelling circus of celebrity, braggadocio and vulgarity would not be likely to impress the capital’s liberal intellectuals, and Trump’s aesthetic taste clashes with the city’s austere marble and concrete. Even his $212m hotel, with its share of chandeliers and gold leaf, is relatively toned down from the faux Versailles aspirations of his properties in Florida and New York.
Nor would Trump find similarities between his voters and the city’s demographics: almost half the population of Washington is African American, part of a group that has for months rejected him. Forty years ago, Trump wanted to build a convention centre but alienated too many black residents, and his new hotel, where he cut the ribbon last month, has already been sprayed with Black Lives Matter graffiti.
Clinton, of course, has lived here. When her husband served as president, he was seen on early morning jogs through the streets, doing Christmas shopping at Union Station or nipping out of the White House for a short-notice dinner.
“He is seen so frequently at this city’s four-star eateries that the local papers are beginning to ignore him,” the Boston Globe reported in April 1993. “It is not unusual for Clinton to have a three-hour, five-course meal at one of the hottest restaurants in town, taking an entourage in tow.”
That entourage included “movie stars” and “an assortment of intellectuals and family friends”, the paper added.
Hillary Clinton, who returned to Washington as a senator in 2000, has remained a regular – the couple still have a house there – at restaurants in Georgetown, Adams Morgan and Foggy Bottom.
The couple’s main home is now in Chappaqua, New York. “When they first came here, they were Arkansans,” a family acquaintance said. “Now they’re New Yorkers and Washingtonians. It’s different.”
Washington has changed, too. In 1991, the year before her husband won the presidential election, it was the murder capital of America with 482 lives lost, most of them black. The 14th and U Street area, where a student Bill witnessed rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, has become a hive of fashionable bars and restaurants.
The capital has been described as the nation’s second-fastest gentrifying city, after Portland, with the familiar downsides of inequality and displacement. Since the 1990s, young professionals have moved en masse into the city, makingunlikely neighbours for either the 70-year-old Trump or 69-year-old Clinton.
The Democrat, in particular, is likely to live a “closeted existence”, according to historian Joshua Kendall. “She’s a very private person and I don’t think she’s comfortable in a lot of settings,” he said. “But there might be a more feminine tone that affects women in the city, highlighting that politics is no longer a boys’ club.
“Trump is different. He likes the crowds. If he’s in a restaurant, he’d want to be the centre of attention. With Trump, not only would you have glitz but what put him on the map, as well as being a real estate developer, was being a TV star. He’s an entertainer and there would be showmanship. With Ronald Reagan, it was like he was playing a film role; with Trump, it would be his biggest role yet.”
But the real stars, Kendall believes, would be Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, 36, or Trump’s daughter Ivanka, 35. Either would be the most influential first daughter since Franklin Roosevelt’s eldest child Anna who, at 37, moved into the White House as his special assistant. “You can imagine Ivanka being a trendsetter, almost in competition with her stepmother.”
Some presidents have lived on Washington; others have lived in it. “I think Reagan was probably the last president to have an effect on Washington,” said writer Anthony Giardina. “People caved. There was a sense of mandate and economic change. He was a seductive figure. Before then, you’ve got John F Kennedy. They were figures of enormous style. They had an imprint.”
Kennedy was a keen theatregoer. He attended the first night of Irving Berlin’s last musical, Mr President, but reportedly left at the interval.
Bush and wife Laura were less conspicuous. They favoured the Tex-Mex restaurant Cactus Cantina but otherwise preferred their ranch in Texas. The Obamas, in contrast, have been regulars on the restaurant circuit: there was a stop at Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street and they celebrated the president’s most recent birthday at Fiola Mare in Georgetown. They have visited bookshops and the Kennedy Center but have been perhaps less visible on the city’s vibrant culture scene than some had hoped.
“I wish they’d come to theatre more,” said Giardina, whose political play, The City of Conversation, was produced by the Arena Stage. The Obamas have not attended.
Trump could hardly be described as a culture vulture or bookworm. He rates his own Art of the Deal as a favourite, and has insulted the co-author. It is hard to picture him poring over the reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson’s library at the Library of Congress, or the First Folios at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
But he has publicised his diet via social media: a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a McDonald’s burger and fries and, in a contrived appeal to Latino voters, a taco bowl. He also loves steak – “it would rock on the plate, it was so well done,” his former butler once said.
The Clintons, meanwhile, will have a host of elite restaurants to choose from. Last month Washington became the fourth US city to get a Michelin guide. José Andrés’s Minibar, Aaron Silverman’s Pineapple and Pearls and Patrick O’Connell’s The Inn at Little Washington all received two stars.
Erik Holzherr, who opened Washington’s first cocktail bar in 2008 in the long-neglected south-east of the city, said he did not expect to see Trump drinking in the city’s more diverse up-and-coming neighbourhoods any time soon. “There might be fireworks. Maybe he will just drink at his own bar.”
But Holzherr does hope that whoever wins will spend time exploring where they live. “I like it when a president really lives in DC versus living in the White House.”
