To the Beltway

I'll be in Washington for three weeks, and I'll report back what I'm seeing

Photo by Robin Pierre on Unsplash

One of the founding principles of this site is that distance from the seat of power offers clarity about what’s happening in the seat of power. Official Washington is a pretty small community of people and small communities of people can be susceptible to groupthink. Being outside that circle has the advantage of not being captured by conventional wisdom.

But as longtime Wolves and Sheep readers may recall, every spring I run a program in Washington where I take fifteen Villanova students inside the fabled Washington Beltway for a three-week immersion experience in American politics. As you might expect, every group is different and every year is different. This year we will no doubt get a lot of questions about Villanova’s most famous alumnus.

Of course—Pope Leo aside—this year will be different because we will be experiencing Donald Trump’s Washington. And this version of Trump’s Washington will be different again from the four programs I ran during Trump’s first presidency.

Those years had the feel of a raucous but high stakes reality TV show. There was an unserious quality to Washington that felt odd and off-putting because it was paired with the profound business of trying to keep the country from falling off a cliff. You could say the mood was somewhere between comical and harrowing, or perhaps comical and harrowing at the same time.

I expect this version to be far worse, but I’m not quite sure what that means. With few guardrails remaining and an administration bent on conquering everything in its path, it’s hard to imagine how Washington will feel. That’s why I’m eager to go there and see it for myself.

And I will report back what I see. The program is fortunate to be afforded extensive access to political players throughout the District. We spend time on the Hill with elected officials, people in leadership positions, and the staffers who make the place run. We go to the Supreme Court. We go to the West Wing. We meet with lobbyists, journalists, party leaders, think tank officials, pollsters, pundits and lawyers. Taken together, it’s possible to get a good read on what people are thinking and experiencing.

My goal is to pass along my sense of how official Washington is processing what Trump is doing. To protect confidentiality, I won’t mention the names of our speakers or the content of what they say. But I will offer my impressions of how things look from the vantage point of the institutions where these speakers work. For instance, I’m hoping to learn how Congressional Republicans really feel about what’s happening, how much the White House is operating inside a bubble of its own creation, and how the routines of official Washington have been upended by the Trump chaos machine.

Washington feels different every year. Because it’s a political city, the way it feels is usually determined by where we are in the political cycle. Last year was dominated by the presidential election and a defiant President Biden, whose inner circle adamantly believed he would be re-elected. Two years before that, DC was obsessed with the pending midterm Red Wave that never developed.

During the first year of a presidential administration, the place Washingtonians refer to as “this town” is typically preoccupied with the legislative agenda, as the new president works feverishly to enact his program before the confining political realities of the next election take hold. I remember how palpably exciting it felt to be in Washington in 2009, when the Obama administration was new, the promise of a revolution in health care policy hung in the air, and everything felt possible. It was the age of hope and change.

I expect hope to be in short supply this year as change points us backwards. But what will that look like and how will it feel? How is official Washington making sense of a president trying to rule by illegal administrative overreach? That’s what I want to find out.

Because the program is intense and program days can linger well into the night, my dispatches from Washington will be brief—at least more brief than my usual posts. But hopefully they will be informative. I may not know what I’m going to find as I venture into the Beltway, but I expect it to be illuminating and I look forward to sharing what I learn.