1. Exactly What Trump Wants
Torch, as he calls himself, is wearing a bandanna over his face, secured just below his eyes. The fabric matches the skinny black jeans, black T-shirt, and hoodie he's wearing during what he characterizes as the "deinauguration of America's Hitler." And when the twenty-four-year-old pulls a hammer out of his backpack and starts chipping away at a stretch of curb near the intersection of Thirteenth and K streets, when he grabs a chunk of pavement and hurls it at a line of riot-gear-clad members of Washington, D.C.'s police department, he gets the chaos he'd traveled from Colorado to incite.
Several officers lob concussion grenades toward the thousands who, moments earlier, had been peacefully protesting the swearing-in of Donald Trump. (Interim D.C. police chief Peter Newsham would later tell the press that it was the protesters, not the cops, who threw the grenades. This was inaccurate.) Others spray chemicals and fire rubber bullets into the crowd. Some protesters murmur that tear gas is moving downwind toward us.
They're right. Moments later, I can barely breathe, my eyes and chest on fire. I fall to my knees. People are fleeing, but one man helps me to my feet.
Torch, meanwhile, stands his ground. "Is that it?" he screams, holding a middle finger into the air while his other hand lets fly another piece of street. "Come on. Let's see what you got, you fuckin' pigs."
I hear two pings and another explosionone that sends hard plastic shrapnel in all directions, hitting twenty-two-year-old D.C. resident Katie McMillan in the thigh. She turns toward Torch, her leg bleeding, and begins to plead with him.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks. "We need to stay peaceful. This is exactly what [Trump] wants. You're giving this piece of shit exactly what he wants."
Torch isn't swayed. "Fuck you. If you can't handle it, you should go back home," he says. "Guys like Trump only respond to force." Several people cheer him on. Dejected, McMillan leaves.
The next hour-plus sees more destruction on this block. The windows of a limousine parked outside a Washington Post building are smashed, the car tagged with spray paint and ultimately set ablaze. Newspaper racks and trash cans are tossed into the middle of the street and set on fire. Self-described anarchists throw everything from construction cones to glass bottles at the cops.
The sounds of chaosglass breaking, metal meeting pavement, grenades exploding, screams, chants, shouted expletivesbounce off the buildings. Every few minutes, the cops beat their batons against riot shields and insist, in one voice, that the crowd "get back." Then they charge, pepper spray streaming from small gaps in their human wall.
Protester after protester goes downone with a gash above his eye, another screaming, "I can't fucking see. I can't fucking see."
A black Suburban with red and blue lights flashing on its dashboard drives through the crowd and doesn't stop when several protesters try to block its path. One hurls a piece of concrete through the SUV's back windshield.
It's a melee, far removed from the "peaceful transfer of power" that reverent television pundits would hail throughout the day. And it's not at all what I expected when I first took to the D.C. streets Friday morning.
So let's rewind.
2. A Real Man
It's seven a.m., and I'm having a smoke on the front porch of the house on Decatur Street where I crashed the night before. My friend (it's her house) had told me to be mindful of where I parked Thursday because the Russian diplomats who live across the street would have me towed. I thought she was kidding. There's no way I'm covering the inauguration of Donald Trumpa man whose election owes in part to Vladimir Putin's meddling, and whose associates are reportedly under FBI investigation for their ties to the Kremlinand just happen to be staying across the street from Russians.
I'm not that lucky.
But when I look across the road, I notice a Russian flag hanging outside a house guarded by chicken wire fencing. Christmas lights are still hanging in the front yard. Two men are smoking cigarettes out front, speaking into cell phones in a foreign tongue. I take a picture to prove serendipity exists.
I hail a cab. My driver, a middle-aged African American who's lived in D.C. since 1969, is fired up. I assumeignoring my tendency to not judge books by their coversthat he's agitated because Barack Obama is hours away from boarding Marine One and leaving Washington. I'm wrong.
"You're not from around here are you?" he asks.
"No, sir. North Carolina."
"Welcome to my city. Welcome to our city. Today's the day. Yes, sir. It's gonna be a good day."
In the fifteen minutes it takes us to get to within earshot of my destination, the corner of Sixteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Al Moore tells me that he's attended every inauguration since he moved to the capital, and that he's upset he has to work today. "A real man," he says, is about to take the oath.
"He tells it like it is," Moore says. "People in my family, they got all angry that I was votin' for him, but I told them, what've the Clintons done for you? Then they talk about, 'He's arrogant.' You tryin' to tell me that Barack Obama isn't arrogant? That's absurd."
Every few blocks, we see groups of protesters walking down the street carrying homemade signs.
"Look at that. This kid's got a drawing of our president kissing Putin," Moore says. "Two men kissing. That ain't right. These kids got no respect for the office or the man. But trust me, they will. He'll make sure of that real quick."
"So you don't have a problem with the way this guy talks about immigrants or the fact that he's appointing people to his Cabinet who've said some pretty questionable things about minorities?" I ask.
Moore laughs. "You see. I don't buy into all that crap the media is selling," he says. "Somebody owns them. You know what I'm sayin'? Follow the money and the truth will set you free. Don't buy into all that propaganda. All I need to know is that a strong man who doesn't take any nonsense is about to face the world and remind people what America's all about."
3. This Road Is Closed
I'm walking through a square near the intersection of Fifteenth and I streets. Hundreds of soon-to-be protesters are mobilizing, discussing how they intend to disrupt the pending inauguration as Secret Service agents dressed in street clothes look on, white earpieces visible under the black beanies they're wearing.
A thirty-two-year-old who claims to be an organizer of DisruptJ20, an amalgamation of activist groups, invites me to join a blockade and assures me that if I get arrested, it's OK to declare my right to remain silent. "Don't talk to them. They'll use it against you."
Within fifteen minutes, we're marching en masse toward an inauguration entry point located near the intersection of Tenth and E streets. Some protesters are already blocking Trump supporters from their desired destination.
A middle-aged white guy wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap tries to reach the checkpoint. He's spent the last five minutes wading through a sea of jeers and chants of "shame" and "stupid fucking hat." But a chain of bodies linked together at the arms is holding the line.
So when he comes upon sixty-six-year-old Californian Xan Joi, a short, soft-spoken woman in a mustard-yellow homemade anti-Trump sweatshirt, he sees it as his best chance to push through. He makes his move.
"I'm sorry, sir. This road is closed," Joi says, her sweet-as-sugar voice prompting even the loudest protesters to flash smiles. "I can't let you pass."
The man throws his arms into the air. "What's that, dear? This road is closed? Where's your permit?" he asks, taking a few steps forward before his torso meets Joi's outstretched hands.
"My permit is the Constitution," she replies. "Please, sir. Help us keep this peaceful."
The man again lunges forwardthis time, aggressivelybut two bystanders shove him back. Joi stays the course.
"Can't you just go another way? Washington is a big city," she pleads.
Moments later, his elbow meets her face. Joi holds her mouth and mutters, eyes wide open as her cheeks turn bright red. The man's friends quickly pull him away from the scene.
"Read the Constitution," Joi shouts, following him up the street.
"I've read the Constitution, you old bat," he replies.
"Well, then, you should understand," Joi screams, the veins in her neck bulging as she angrily waves her arms. "You should understand that we have a responsibility to shut this government down."
[page]4. A Vote for Putin
The officers standing behind the blockade at Tenth and E are mostly passive. Sure, they're helping Trump devotees when they attempt to break through the protest, but there's little force on display. And the protesters, while nonviolent, know how to get under the skin of Trump's supporters, like forty-three-year-old Brian Hudson.
"I'm not afraid of being pushed around," Hudson says defiantly after a failed attempt to break through the line. "I'm an American and freedom is guaranteed to me. I have every right to walk down this street. Watch me."
He charges the blockade and yells "sore losers" and "why don't you go get a job" when he's pushed back. An older man waves his finger at the protesters and tells them, "You can't be blocking the street like this." In unison, they respond: "Here's your wall. Here's your wall." A man behind me yells, "A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin. You betrayed your country."
Hudson, who drove from Louisiana to be here, calls the protest "disgraceful."
"We didn't do this when Barack Hussein Obama was elected," he says. "But these whiny liberals always throw a fit when things don't go their way. I bet half of them didn't even vote, and the other half were paid to be down here."
Hudson makes two more attempts to break through before giving up and turning away. But before he's out of sight, he cups his mouth with his hands and bellows, "You better get used to losing, losers. Trump's gonna win and win. You might as well deal with it."
5. War Zone
I spend the next few hours watching as, one by one, Trump supporters fail to breach DisruptJ20's blockade. And as more and more protesters converge on the intersection, the chants get, shall we say, creative.
"My pussy. My call. Fuck your wall," the crowd roars, cheering before a young woman with a megaphone leads them in song. "When the people rise up, the power comes down," she sings.
A few minutes before Trump takes the oath, I walk into a pizza shop. A handful of bikers are standing at the bar, drinks in hand as they toast their new president as he's being sworn in. When it ends, I head back down to the protests to see if an official transition of power has inspired any action. It has.
The crowd dissipates, and large clusters of protesters march in different directions. Groups of hundreds converge a few blocks away from the intersection where, an hour later, D.C. would resemble a metropolitan war zone. Stopped cars are swallowed up by the thousands carrying signs, playing instruments, and recording video on their cell phones.
There are people walking on stilts and a massive inflatable elephant with "RACISM" written on its side. There's dancing, singing, and groups of a dozen or more joining hands to block intersections, blissfully unaware that, a mere two blocks down the road, they'll be greeted by riot cops, and when the two groups come face to face, what starts as a standoff will end in violence.
More than two hundred people will be arrested and charged with crimes ranging from vandalism to inciting a riot. Several storefronts will be damaged, including a Starbucks and a Bank of America. Then there's the aforementioned flaming limo.
Torch tells me it's necessary. "I hope it sends a message. You know, people think people like me don't give a fuck and just want to break shit," he says. "But the truth is, Trump is gonna lie about the size of this protest. He's gonna say all these people were paid and try to pull one over on the ignorant people who voted for him. But the cameras were rolling when those grenades were flying. They were rolling when we fucked up that limo. Let's see him try to lie that shit away."
6. Gaslighter in Chief
The day after the inauguration, the newly elected president validated the anarchist I met at Thirteenth and K. Those who participated in Saturday's Women's Marchmore than a half-million, by some accounts (see page 19)brought public transit and traffic to a standstill. Trump supporters turned out in no such droves Friday.
But the president did exactly what Torch predicted. He pushed a false narrative that a million-plus people stretched all the way to the Washington Monument during the inauguration, a claim quickly debunked by numerous aerial photographs. After the National Park Service retweeted side-by-side images of Obama's 2009 inauguration and Trump's paltrier one, the Trump administration banned the NPS from using Twitter. Experts told The New York Times over the weekend that fewer than two hundred thousand people attended the inauguration; in 2009, Obama got 1.8 million.
Trump's response? To declare, during remarks delivered during his first visit to the CIA, that the media was "dishonest." White House press secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on his boss's claim, telling reporters that Friday's crowd was "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period," a statement Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway said was based on "alternate facts."
I can only speak to what I experienced: finding a cab with no problem in the morning and again later that night, being able to grab lunch downtown without having to wait for a table, never seeing more than a handful of Trump supporters together at the same time. My second cabbie, another middle-aged African American who went by the nickname Easy, told me that getting around had been surprisingly smooth.
"But on the radio," he added, "they say it's gonna be insane tomorrow. Part of me wants to drive and make some real money."
This article appeared in print with the headline "The Resistance: Day 1."
3 of 4
Photo by Carlos Andres Varela
Protesters create a blockade at an entrance to the inauguration.
Back to Top