The frozen swamp

 Washington, DC

As a prison worker in Florida put it, ‘Trump’s not hurting the right people’

Washington is supposed to be recession-proof: when times are bad, the government just hires more. But the city isn’t shutdown-proof. There are more than 360,000 federal employees in the DC area, and many are among the 800,000 across America who last week received a salary bank transfer that said zero dollars and zero cents.

A number of foodbanks have opened here, offering free meals to anyone with federal identification. Whole Foods, the upmarket supermarket, has gone a step further. It is serving spaghetti dinners to anyone who is hungry. Not everyone I met at this ‘community gathering’ was a federal worker, though they all communed in a spirit of anti–presidential solidarity. I saw a large woman helping herself to a big plate of free food, and asked if she were a federal employee. ‘No,’ she replied crossly. ‘What about you — journalist?’ I then saw a young man, Rob, tucking into the garlic bread. Did he work for the government? ‘No, but my partner does,’ he answered. ‘This is more about every-one coming together to support each other through the shutdown. It’s kind of sweet if you think about it.’ In the canteen, I found three fully furloughed federal employees, Adam, Anne and Christina, munching on the free grub. ‘Donald Trump can give people McDonald’s in the White House,’ said Christina. ‘Why can’t we eat free pasta at Whole Foods?’ It snowed in Washington over the weekend. Late on Sunday, the government’s Office for Personnel Management announced that federal offices would be closed due to the weather. But by then nobody much cared: politics had already shut the city down. The so-called ‘Trump Shutdown’ — the longest government shutdown in US history — now feels a bit like Brexit in Westminster.