Washington dc

Making time to prepare to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has not been easy. Presently I’m flying back to New York, where I live, on a red-eye after a show in Las Vegas. My wife and five kids, all under the age of ten, are at home waiting for me. On average, I have one media appearance every day and a half between now and then. I’m not asking you to cry for me. All of this momentum and publicity is terrific. And my preparation for the big night on April 25 is always simmering below the surface. It feels as if reading minds for the last 30 years has been training for this moment. My goal is to have Donald Trump take part – and to save the best for last. If I could read only one mind in this world, it would be that of the most powerful person in the world.

In the last five years of his life, when I knew Richard Nixon, nothing described him better than Milton’s “calm of mind, all passion spent.” During the most tumultuous political career in American history he had come back many times, but the greatest comeback of all was in full swing. His enemies had seized control of the puritanical conscience of America to slay him, unjustly, and he was manipulating the same national conscience, which was founded on Plymouth Rock and has survived all the corruption and hypocrisy and violence of American public life, and when aroused, is insuperable. Since his political fall, and later his death, polls increasingly indicate public unease about the treatment of Richard Nixon.

Pete Hegseth’s Saturday begins with personal training. The Secretary of War, @SecWar on your socials, is very fond of working out with the troops – something most defense secretaries have done without someone dutifully filming the experience for Instagram. Then he heads off to the Reagan National Defense Forum, the annual gathering of war hawks, policy nerds and defense contractors in Simi Valley, California. Hegseth, the veteran of the Global War on Terror, is there to fulfill his mission of denouncing the neocons. “Out with idealistic utopianism, in with hard-nosed realism,” he declares, insisting the United States will no longer be “distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation-building.

Suddenly it’s Ibsen season in Washington, DC. It’s true that only Shakespeare’s plays are performed worldwide more often than Henrik Ibsen’s. But to have two of the great 19th-century Norwegian playwright’s works running at once in the nation’s capital is unusual. And the works in question – An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck – deliver contradictory messages. Together they say something not only about the state of the arts in Washington, but also about the state of the liberal mind. Politics is very much a presence on the capital’s stages. The city’s two main Shakespeare organizations, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Folger Theatre, last year presented seasons heavily influenced by the presidential election.

I tweeted the other day that my social life in Trump’s DC is just getting dinner or drinks with a different Dr. Strangelove character every week. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Not really. Every week brings its own apocalypse – and the cast of characters responds accordingly. Find here a taxonomy of DC types: Dr. Strangelove (The theorist) The end of the world approaches and only the strong will survive it. Hands trembling slightly from too much caffeine and suppressed grandeur, he (it’s always a he) declares his grand theory of the world in so many words. Women, of course, will be spared. Perhaps you, too, will be counted among the lucky ones. Oh, you’re over 30? If you just read a little more Spengler. Learned a little more about semiconductors.

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

There is nothing like the thrill of getting a White House invitation. Even though I worked there at the time, I vividly recall the sparkly feeling when I read that "The President and First Lady" requested the pleasure of my company at a reception for the US Embassy hostages who had just come home from captivity in Iran. It was a great stroke for my ego, simultaneously a sensation of importance and reward for work well done. My origins are plebeian and it ranked among the most exciting things that happened to me since being unexpectedly invited to tea with Princess Margaret at Oxford. A White House social invitation is an informal tool of presidential power. From George and Martha Washington onward White House invitations have been used to achieve policy aims.

It is difficult to romanticize the political theater of Washington, DC, when you live so close to it. The absurdity feels routine after a while. You grow desensitized to the Machiavellian scheming, the name-calling, the ceremonial outrage. News outlets blast cinematic plot twists to the American public while quieter forces go unnoticed. With September growing late and the humdrum heat and headlines of Washington refusing to break, I turned to film in an attempt to re-enchant myself with the city in which I live. I rewatched two movies which capture its deeper moods. In spite of their tonal differences, both struck me in their portrayal of life just apart from the curtain – Washington not as the center of power, but as a place shadowed by it.

“They are the ones who are making it a war zone,” Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois bloviated on CNN recently, as Jake Tapper listened, displaying his best Resting Serious Journalist Face. “They need to get out of Chicago. If they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the President said they were going to do, they need to get the heck out.”   ICE has overreached its authority, according to Pritzker, arresting innocent children and zip-tying grandparents in the middle of the night, asking people for their citizenship papers on the street. And yet here comes the National Guard, as ordered by Donald Trump, an “invasion” of trained soldiers from Texas. “Every American needs to stand up and stop this madness,” Governor McCheese tweeted.