Make America Great Again Shit Sandwich
AP Photo
2016
Scenes From the Trump Hotel
In the Washington he wants to attack, the scene inverse quickly from ironic cocktail hour to an elated frenzy of supporters.
At the Trump International Hotel in Washington, just afterwards 2 p.thou. on Election Twenty-four hour period, it was nonetheless possible to await at the modern, matte-glass façade that said "Presidential Ballroom" and wonder whether it was foreshadowing or simply the folly of hubris.
The hotel became a gathering spot, and at offset information technology was mostly not Trump supporters who were gathering. At that place was a movie coiffure trailing a man in a dark suit and a black tie that said in large white letters "NEVER TRUMP." They were from "11.8.16," a documentary shot on Ballot Day by 37 filmmakers, including Lena Dunham, simultaneously. The human being was Andrew Weinstein, a veteran Republican and a leader of the unofficial Never Trump movement. He was meeting some friends—Republican Women for Clinton—for an ironic cocktail, only the camera coiffure was promptly stopped by hotel security, wide men with earpieces who floated menacingly around the vestibule and, for virtually of the afternoon, seemed more numerous than the guests.
Weinstein ordered a glass of white wine and perched on a aureate and turquoise throne, with Jennifer Lim and Meghan Milloy, the Republican women for Hillary. The Never Trumpers toasted and joked. What did mean that Milloy's martini was taking extra long because the bartender "made information technology special"? "I need a medical warning bracelet: Just Had Special Trump Martini." Did they feel comfortable eating the snacks, or Trump'due south nuts? A friend and supporter came over from the nearby USAID building, pinned a Never Trump pin to his lapel, and sat chatting with them about all their friends who were either supporting Clinton or apologizing for voting Trump. They talked nearly whether they'd have jobs in the Clinton administration. (Depends.) "When this is over," said Weinstein, "there are going to be more Republicans who say they were Never Trump than in that location are hippies who said they were at Woodstock." People at neighboring tables chuckled at them supportively. "I'thou just here having dejeuner because Fogo de Chao was closed," a nearby Clinton voter said digging into his burger, adding that he hoped tonight would bring 1 effect for Donald Trump: "a shit sandwich."
For near of the afternoon, the Trump supporters that were there were the reluctant ones. "I voted for him because I'yard voting against her," said Dave Owen, a Republican from California's bourgeois Riverside Canton. His married woman Laurie had been a Rubio supporter.
The place seemed deserted, so I went upstairs to a room I'd booked, where I establish the more traditional Trump décor, in one case described by Jonathan Van Meter every bit "Louis the Someteenth." I was greeted by a hand-written welcome notation from the hotel director, Mickael C. Damelincourt, and I imagined Mr. Damelincourt holed upwardly in the bowels of the old Mail Office, laboring in his shirtsleeves, scribbling hundreds of notes, wondering if calling it the "hospitality industry" was simulated advertising. Beside information technology was a gray slate disk with a dessert progression: ii fig halves, three chocolate-covered strawberries, iv macaroons, and a replica of the Capitol dome rendered in, what else, white chocolate. In the bathroom, I found that all the accoutrements—the mouthwash, the soap, the shower cap, the towels—were all fabricated elsewhere: Canada, Red china, Bharat. I flipped through the room service carte but was disappointed to notice no taco bowl. I called the Ivanka Spa. It hadn't opened yet, and at that place were nevertheless hours to fill before the results started trickling in. I constitute a Gideons Bible and with it a note that offered me any number of sacred texts "to continue your spiritual journeying," including the Talmud, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita. I ordered a Quran, which arrived atop a prayer mat with a built-in compass.
That should've been my offset giveaway that things that dark would non get every bit I predicted.
As the solar day grew later the sounds of merriment began drifting upward through the behemothic atrium: laughter, bells and the unts-unts of lounge music. The sedate lobby bar had become a nightclub full of young men in red Make America Great Again hats and older men who wished they were still younger men. The sommelier rolled effectually a champagne cart, slicing off the corks with a machete to much hooting and squealing. Immature women with long, curled hair, clingy, open dresses, and alpine, strappy heels discussed when and where they got their lip jobs, and how "Flynn paid for Natasha's" (boobs). A pair of high-pitched twins from Arizona oohed and ahhed over the service at Trump hotels, which reminded them of service in Latin America—"then much better." "They just stand back behind your table and wait for you to call them over no affair what," one of them said. "And they love it. They dear doing it. They're non just doing it because they need a task."
A couple from Chicago sat on a blue velvet settee, sated on steaks and cheeses and wines. They too loved the service at Trump hotels. "You lot're a office of the family, and in that location'southward nothing phony about information technology," said Shelly, who works in marketing and declined to requite her last name. Like many of the guests last night, they pointed to the great diversity of the staff (the scattering of white employees all seemed to be bartenders). "Trump has been employing people for decades," Paul said. "You lot'd call back that, in all those years, they would've found i unhappy employee. Simply they didn't notice any. Not one." (Information technology helps that all of them have to sign nondisclosure agreements.) Paul was a wellness intendance executive from Toronto and he believed in the ideals of America—hard work, freedom, freedom—but he was property off on getting his U.S. citizenship. If Trump won, he'd practise it. If Clinton did, not a hazard. "I still believe America is the greatest land in the world," he explained. "It'll only exist less."
Luckily, he didn't take to expect long. By 9, the results were trickling in. Thank you went upwards at every partial project. The sound level rose and rose, every bit did chants of "Lock her up!" and "Build that wall!" (Somewhere behind me a young adult female antiseptic that "we should go along the dogs and transport back the people!") A young Nigerian-American man named Até suddenly appeared by my side. "Tin can you please reassure me?" he pleaded. I shrugged helplessly and he turned his face back up to the iv jumbo screens and tried his hand at it himself. "I'm a firm believer in math," he said to no 1 in particular.
***
"Are yous fix to concede yet?" said Richard Spencer, the immature white nationalist who coined the term "alt-correct," swilling a Manhattan and doing his best to look the office of 1930s hipster in tweed slacks and a matching vest, and that crisp "fash" haircut, which combines the words for "fashion" and "fascist," and, Spencer said, has "spread like wildfire."
"People didn't understand the power of the white vote," he said jubilantly.
Was this a white victory? I asked him.
"Totally!" he said. This, he said, was a victory over "the abstract idea of citizenship" in favor of "identity and a nation," "because, fundamentally, to be an American is to be a white person." (Every bit for the people who don't fit that category, "They're not going anywhere.")
"And the other thing is that the cucks are dead," he said, using the alt-correct slang for establishment conservatives they despise. "They chose the incorrect side and nosotros chose the right side. We are going to displace the conservative movement, we are going to exist the right. Period. It's going to exist a lot of fun." The alt-right would get professionalized and would become the new political establishment on the correct, which was fine, Spencer said, because they don't mind the political establishment as long as they're the political institution.
Which got Spencer thinking: What part could he play in a Trump administration? "I would want to be secretary of state," he said. His offset trip would be to Syria, his second to Russian federation—to tell them "we're not going to get into a state of war over this"—so to China. Declining that, though, Spencer would want to be minister of culture and "spend millions of dollars on Wagner."
The chat kind of soured—"I feel similar this is an inquisition"—when he refused to say whether Hitler was good or bad—"he's an important historical figure"—or whether the Holocaust was skillful or bad, said that the anti-Semitic alt-right trolls haranguing me and other Jewish journalists were "just kids having fun," and when he slid his finger downward the back of my apparel and said, "You have a slit hither." Surprised at my request not to affect me, he asked me to "calm downward."
***
Michelle Renee was freaking out. "I'chiliad freaking ooooouuuuuuut!" she squealed. "You tell me if this isn't a modern-day Game of Thrones."
A high-stop beauty consultant, she felt deeply betrayed and hurt past her community. "I've been called a white human lover, a coon, a black bitch," Michelle Renee, a alpine black woman in a gold-spangled skirt and with vertiginous pilus. "By blackness people, not white people. Black people." She was i of a handful of black Trump supporters there, including a existent estate broker and landlord Nathan Boggs. He despised Obama—"never worked a twenty-four hour period in his life"—and the rappers with ankle bracelets he brought to the White Business firm, instead of strengthening police and guild. "A lot of blacks I just can't rent to," he told me. "They're bad tenants." And they're bad workers. "If I need skilled labor, I'grand going to hire a white man," Boggs said. "If I need unskilled labor, I'm going to hire a Hispanic." Before long, he and the people at his table were deep in a fence on the politics of respectability before a local black venture backer (and Clinton voter) named Karen Jones weighed in. "I'm here looking for business organisation," she said. "Ain't nothing in the room hither but money. Look at all these old rich white men."
Past one-half by 1, information technology was all just official and the oversupply had grown sparse. The young men, shirttails flying, careened around the bar, pumping their fists, shouting Trump slogans, and speculating nigh the "weiner size" of various Fob commentators. I of their older compatriots backed into me and then, arguing that I had fronted into him, offered to fight me, or at the very least take an incriminating flick of me standing almost the bar, perhaps for insurance purposes.
All those Trump supporters who had come up to his hotel to support him couldn't even sentinel the celebrated moment of their candidate accepting the crown: by 2 a.m., as per D.C. ordinance, the bar was closed, the TVs were off. A solitary supporter yawped, his phone call echoing through the giant, lofted infinite. "No more bullshiiiiiit!"
On my way out, I passed two black women concierges, both clad in hotel uniforms designed past Ivanka, treatment the phones. It was 3 a.m. People were calling most booking rooms for the inauguration, even at a five-nighttime minimum, $ane,250 per night, non-refundable. "The phones take been ringing off the hook!" one of them said. "I desire to get to bed!"
I went down the cerise carpeted stairs, by the Presidential Ballroom, and got into a cab. Washington was desolate, and inverse.
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/scenes-from-the-trump-hotel-214441
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