When Matt Mowers moved to Washington in November 2016, he wasn’t expecting a hero’s welcome. The young political operative had worked for Donald Trump’s campaign in New York, where you can hardly walk down the block in many neighborhoods without spying the words “F**k Trump” scrawled somewhere on the streetscape.
But last year, his new neighbors in Dupont Circle, the upscale area known for its stately townhouses, pulled some moves that surprised even Mowers, by then chief of staff at the State Department’s global AIDS office. In the run-up to Mowers’ first Halloween here, one of his neighbors strung up a skeleton and a pumpkin next to each other on a tree. The pumpkin had a sign: “Now kids, just because you’re orange doesn’t mean you’re related to him!” With the dangling skeleton was a more menacing note: “Donald Trump’s EPA director.”
There’s always tension when administrations change in Washington; a new cast of characters arrives, and an influx of appointees, lobbyists and hangers-on have to stake out their own ground. But the era of Donald Trump is—as in so many respects—different.
Washington is a hipper city now than it’s ever been, a place where staffers, especially young staffers who want to drink and date and live normal millennial lives, would want to live. The problem is, if you work for Trump, it’s also more hostile territory than it’s ever been. The president campaigned against the very idea of “Washington,” slammed cities as “war zones” and ran a racially charged campaign whose coded messages weren’t lost on the diverse, Democratic-leaning residents of D.C.’s buzzing neighborhoods. The bar-filled areas that became synonymous with young Washington in the Obama era—Columbia Heights, Shaw, U Street, H Street—are full of anti-Trump T-shirts and street art. Even old Republican redoubts like Spring Valley in upper Northwest aren’t very Trump-friendly.
So, what’s a young Trumpie to do? Many still do live in D.C., and to understand what their lives here are like, we interviewed more than 30 millennial staffers from the Trump White House and across the administration, both current and former (many have already left), as well as a smattering of their friends and outside observers. Nearly all spoke on the condition of anonymity, to talk candidly about their personal lives or because they were not authorized by their bosses to comment. They told us their horror stories about being heckled on the street and their struggles to get a date. Unlike their predecessors, who made their mark on the city’s social scene, they largely keep to themselves, more likely to hop between intimate apartment gatherings than to hit the town. “Instead of folks looking outward,” explains one young White House aide, “more folks look inward.”
Faced with open antagonism, Trump’s millennials over the past year and a half have quietly settled on the margins: a stretch of Washington that spans from the Wharf—a shiny new development three blocks south of the National Mall—southeast along the Waterfront and into Navy Yard, on the banks of the Anacostia River. It’s a string of neighborhoods that peer out over the water, separated from most of the city by an interstate, and facing away from official Washington. It’s a bubble within the Washington bubble: Here, young Trump staffers mix largely with each other and enjoy the view from their rooftop pools, where they can feel far away from the District’s locals and the rest of its political class.
It’s not all a tale of discomfort. Many shrug off the drawbacks by pointing out that at least they’re not in New York or back on their college campuses, where their politics were even less welcome. And they’re learning one lesson that every new wave of operators learns: In Washington—even in Trump’s Washington—as long as you have power, you can manage to feel popular somewhere.
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It’s not so surprising that Trump’s young aides keep to themselves given the politics of the city they’ve colonized. Only 4 percent of the District’s vote went to Trump in 2016; his next-worst showing was Hawaii, where he got nearly 30 percent of the vote. Trump’s inauguration drew a lackluster crowd, and his real welcome to the city came the next day, when hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed the Mall for the Women’s March. A constant stream of anti-Trump demonstrations has followed. Signs declaring “Love trumps hate” and other visible markers of the “resistance” are everywhere. Staffers leaving the White House grounds semi-regularly catch passersby flipping them the bird.
“I have gotten yelled at a few times walking out of work,” lamented one White House staffer. “I want to get home, not get in a debate in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Sometimes, the easiest option is to hide their identities. While under normal circumstances, you could expect young White House officials to work their job titles into conversations at the earliest opportunity, the Trump crew has learned to use the types of dodges more commonly deployed by employees of the CIA. “I’ll just say I work for the federal government,” says a White House aide. After some conversations at bars on U Street and the Hill turned south when his Trump ties came up, one since-departed staffer has learned to reveal his White House past only as a last resort. “Even now, people have to ask five or six times before I say, ‘Yeah, I worked there,’” he says. When being vague doesn’t cut it, staffers can always straight-up lie, as one young administration official learned to do while working out of New York during the campaign. “I told people I was an auditor down on Wall Street, and people just stopped asking me questions after that,” he recalls.
When it comes to disclosing their affiliation with Trump, no ground is more fraught than courtship. “Trump supporters swipe left”—meaning “don’t even bother trying”—might be the single most common disclaimer on dating app profiles in Washington.
One beleaguered 31-year-old female administration official described at length her “very, very frequent” scraps with her matches on dating apps. “You do the small talk thing, and you have a very good conversation, and then they might say, ‘You didn’t vote for Trump, right?’” she says. “As soon as I say, ‘Of course I did,’ it just devolves into all-caps ‘HOW COULD YOU BE SUCH A RACIST AND A BIGOT?’ And ‘You’re going to take away your own birth control.’” In one recent star-crossed exchange, the official told a match she worked for the federal government. When he pushed, she revealed she was in the administration. He asked her, “Do you rip babies from their mothers and then send them to Mexico?”
Evasive answers will get you only so far, though, since many dating apps provide enough information for inquisitive users to sleuth out their matches’ identities. “I literally got the other day, ‘Thanks but no thanks. Just Googled you and it said you were a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Go fuck yourself,’” says the official. It’s all enough to drive her and some of her colleagues away from at least some of the apps. “I’m no longer on Bumble,” she says.
Young staffers have had to develop a keen sense of just when to have “The Talk” with romantic partners. “I’ve still been able to hook up with women,” says a male former White House staffer. “But I know that I need to be careful about broaching the Trump stuff. I just know that going in, I need to be able to get it out at the right time and not get it out too early to the point where it’s like, ‘Hey, I worked for Trump, you should stop talking to me,’ but late enough in that eventually they know that there is this information floating out there that I worked for this guy and hopefully you have now seen that I’m not a horrible person and we can go further with this.”
Another former Trump White House aide says the experience of his single colleagues has given him a new appreciation for life in a committed relationship. “Thank God I’ve had a girlfriend of three years,” he says, “because the last person I would want to be is a single Trump supporter dating in D.C. right now.” Yet another former aide put the best possible spin on the predicament. “My grandmother used to joke that the key to dating is to just be interesting, and I think working in President Trump’s White House is the definition of interesting,” he says.
A common coping mechanism is to date within the administration, or go on intra-administration double dates. “Other couples often want to do double dates with Vanessa and I,” says Mike Ambrosini, 27, who served last year as special assistant to the president and director of the office of the chief of staff; his fiancée, Vanessa Morrone, also 27, is White House director of regional communications. Other Trump couples in the mix for the outings include Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s executive assistant, and her boyfriend, Ben Schramm, a political appointee at the Pentagon and a former Marine social aide at the White House, as well as Giovanna Coia, a White House press assistant, and her boyfriend, John Pence, a senior adviser on Trump’s reelection campaign. Coia is also the cousin of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, and Pence’s uncle, of course, is the vice president.
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SOURCE: DANIEL LIPPMAN and BEN SCHRECKINGER
Politico
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