3 months ago
23
August in Washington is a humid, miserable affair. There aren’t many tourists, and anyone who can escape from the city will use any excuse to do so. This year, though, President Donald Trump used this to his advantage, becoming the only player in town and turning the capital into a summer camp for his dictatorial ambitions while Congress and the courts were on holiday.
Over the last month, he’s been unshackled by any other political realities. He mistook an empty Washington for a captive audience and chose to create more chaos at home and abroad. The recess showed how far he’ll go when no one’s watching – and the test that awaits when Washington crowds back in.
President Donald Trump at the White House earlier this month.Credit: AP
Trump used the break to try and seize what he cast as an opening in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hosting both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky on US soil – not to resolve the conflict so much as to present himself as the big strong man in charge. Putin flew home with the footage he wanted, Zelensky avoided a repeat of his February disaster, alongside an armada of European allies and Trump whisperers, while Trump himself got nothing for his troubles.
In his second stint in the White House, part of Trump’s mission has been to bring the Federal Reserve to heel, demanding lower rates as a matter of instinct, not economics. Despite repeated warnings that politicising the Fed could risk a recession, Trump used the recess to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook (Cook refused to resign, setting up a legal fight that experts say could run to the Supreme Court).
In a quiet capital, he deployed hundreds of National Guard troops and announced a federal takeover of Washington’s police, framing it as a crime emergency. Of course, this was less about crime than about branding political dissent as a threat and making it clear that he is in charge. Even the city’s infrastructure has not been spared, with Trump recently taking control of Washington’s train system – a move so absurdly petty it might be funny if it weren’t so drenched in irony; a strongman claiming public transit as a tool of control.
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These gestures are not the stuff of normal governance. They are the instincts of a leader who sees every lever of the state as a weapon against his opponents.
Where pushback did appear, it was still all about Trump. Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom spent August needling the president in his own style on social media – his all-caps posts sent MAGA acolytes into fits over tactics Trump has used for years. There are AI-generated images of celebrities praying for Newsom, and a new merch store offering Newsom bibles. Newsom even signs off his tweets with “thank you for your attention to this matter” – a traditional Trump sign-off.
For once, he was on the receiving end of his own playbook, and Trump noticed. When asked for comment by Politico, the White House responded with a meme as an official comment. And there have been floods of interviews by Trump allies about how he doesn’t even notice Newsom’s posts. It’s the kind of response we’re used to seeing when one of his former staffers gives a damaging interview and Trump then spends the next few weeks processing his emotions in public.
This week, the recess ends. Congress gavels back after Labor Day (September 2), which unofficially ends the American summer holidays, and provides lawmakers with roughly a month to fund the federal government before the October 1 deadline.
Expect budget fights, a bruising round of judicial confirmations, and fresh scrutiny of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which remains deeply unpopular. Republicans only muscled that bill through on the smallest of margins – a difference shaped by Democratic vacancies earlier in the year, a grim reminder of the party’s gerontocracy.
Since 2013, budget fights have become increasingly normal, ending in full-scale government shutdowns three times. But this year, Republicans have slim majorities in Congress that only allow them to lose a handful of votes in either chamber to approve the $US7 trillion budget for the coming fiscal year, which will involve re-hashing many of the same debates in Trump’s Bill. No details have emerged yet, nor have the battle lines for either party – which are sure to appear in the coming days.
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For all of August, Trump had the limelight to himself. He didn’t have to answer a single Epstein-related question, nor any other questions he didn’t like, for that matter. Every bit of humid oxygen in Washington belonged to him. That helped drive failed attempts at “peace” in Ukraine that Putin never intended to grant – because Trump’s goal wasn’t peace; it was the performance of strength for a domestic audience.
Within the US, Trump let his imagination run wild. As his overwrought tariff regime begins to raise prices for the very voters who backed him, he’s been enacting a playbook that – if tried by a less wealthy state – would draw global condemnation. Troops on the streets where he’s deemed threats to himself. Talk of spreading it to other cities. This is exactly what Trump’s critics warned about last year following his re-election in November – and it is the same process that turned the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire: a messy, cataclysmic slide that ends the hope of democracy.
But that August fantasy is ending. As Washington fills again, Trump is no longer the only person in the city. In the coming weeks, the UN General Assembly will draw world leaders to New York just as Congress sprints to avert a shutdown – two pressure points that force the White House to share oxygen and explain itself.
The question now isn’t whether August revealed his instincts – it did. It’s whether the institutions returning to work will rein this chaos in – or make it worse. He’ll now be in a crowded Washington, his ambitions no longer the only thing filling the city.
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