Stepping off the Trump treadmill: A CBC correspondent bids farewell to Washington

CBC

2 days ago

I got a journalism tip over drinks from a veteran Canadian correspondent when I first landed in Washington more than a decade ago — a formula for stories guaranteed to thrill audiences back home.
In summary? The more ridiculous Americans look, the better. Guns, rednecks, cultural stereotypes, I was told, if you've got that, you've got gold. Canadians eat that stuff up.
The exchange never left me. As I depart Washington a dozen years later, it's still on my mind, and not because it was inaccurate.
I'll confess, on occasion, I had my fun. A piece of personal trivia: I met Lauren Boebert years before she became famous as a rabble-rousing congresswoman. I popped into her restaurant near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains whose main news draw was that the waitresses all carried guns.
"It's not just the fried jalapeños packing heat," is how I began my Canadian Press story. "A spicy hamburger, here, comes with a side of handgun."
Over time, though, that type of story got old. Like gorging on empty calories — briefly fun, ultimately unfulfilling.
Here I was, reporting from a nation that's won more Nobel Prizes than a string of runners-up combined. It's produced a staggering number of patents, thriving metropolises, inventions spanning the assembly line to the internet, not to mention the blues, jazz and rock 'n' roll.
Surely there were more useful tales from this place? Surely it's more than a backdrop for ego-stroking entertainment — a comedy to mock, a tragedy to pity.
To be fair, every country has its quirks, flaws and tragedies. But we'll talk politics in a second.
The America behind the camera
Let's start with an accurate stereotype. Anybody in our community of foreign correspondents can confirm it: Americans are easy to interview. Absent rare exceptions, they love to talk.
This can be jarring to a foreigner, especially if you come from a country with a culture rich in talking points and "No comment" responses.
But here, you stick a mic in someone's face, and before you know it, you're invited into the kitchen, you're having coffee, your notepad's suddenly filling up with their life story.
I'm thinking of all those people who spilled their lives out to me, a total stranger. People who've cried, even offered me hugs when I left.
I was blessed to criss-cross this country and talk to people thousands of kilometres apart — literally and figuratively. People who, if seated together, might barely last a minute chatting politics without arguing. But they shared a willingness to talk to me, and, by extension, to you.
They like Canadians, by the way; even now, the vast majority of Americans do. The feeling lately is not mutual. The news from Washington has Canadians aggrieved and angry.
There's plenty to be aggrieved about. Much of the news is disturbing lately. But the news is a finite window onto the world. Its lens captures tragedy, better than it does the countless cases of everyday decency. Like the 100-year-old woman I just met — on a sidewalk, protesting because she's worried about health care and education for future generations.
I stopped seeing the U.S. as a two-dimensional entity on a screen as it became the surroundings of my life, filled with people and places in three dimensions.
In some circles, this is referred to as going native. I don't think so. What I encountered was layer after layer, of story after story, and found it harder to tell. It's more work, and less fun, writing stories sprinkled with qualifiers — however s and although s and not quite s.
I'll pick a classic example of our national difference: health care. The canonical story is straightforward — it's public in Canada, private in the U.S., and that's how it goes.
The reality's messier. Nearly 40 per cent of Americans have public health care. In Canada, it's 72 per cent publicly funded. It's a notable difference, yes, but perhaps not Venus and Mars.
A decade-plus on the Trump treadmill
I recall a specific case of starting to see the world through American eyes. It was the day of the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. I read a take from a European commentator who felt no sympathy for Americans — after all, he said, these people keep voting for this.
He saw the country as an entity. I saw my toddler. She mentioned a delightful teacher of hers during the ride home from daycare that day. I had just read about a teacher murdered while defending students, and I remember feeling my chest and throat flip upside-down in the car.
I was enraged when I read that commentator's casual slur. Reducing this place to an amoral monolith wasn't just cruel — it ignored this country's reality of constant debate, fierce fights and razor-thin politics, where a fraction of one per cent of the electorate shifting across three states can alter the course of history.
Now let's talk about Donald Trump. We can only avoid him for so long.
Here's a snapshot of life covering this president. It's top of mind because it happened to unfold on June 4, while I was planning this piece. It all occurs within 22 minutes.
It's bathtime. I'm preparing the kids for bed. One, two, three major news stories land while I'm soaping, shampooing and towelling.
Here's my perspective as the White House emails a string of executive orders, as experienced through my smartwatch:
7:40 p.m. Ping! Trump bans travel from 12 countries.
7:45 p.m. Ping! Trump launches investigation into predecessor, hints he may invalidate past pardons, opening door to prosecuting enemies.
8:02 p.m. Ping! Foreign students banned from Harvard. In the time this happens, I field several demands for attention, and foil one plot to stuff cotton balls into the bath drain.
There's no time to cover any of them the next day. By then, Trump is at war with Elon Musk. A day later, a twist in a burgeoning constitutional crisis. And there's a tense standoff — masked immigration officers against protesters, escalating Trump's battle against the state of California, in which he eventually shatters generations of precedent by taking over the state National Guard.
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By the end of the month, he'd bombed Iran, threatened new tariffs, suspended trade talks with Canada, then un-suspended them.
It's a marathon. Except when you're about to reach the finish line, someone moves it another few dozen kilometres down the road.
Watching a political system fall apart
I thought it was over on Jan. 6, 2021. I stood among the crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Trump's behalf.
Indelible memories of that day include riding on the Washington, D.C., metro, hearing Trump supporters speculate about a military execution for Vice-President Mike Pence.
One scene that stuck with me was rioters berating police for not joining them. A man in his 60s, standing in the street with a buddy, heckled officers: "What side are you on?"
This is the kind of scene that happens at the outset of a civil war in countless other places: Who are the police backing? What about the army?
It just doesn't happen across the river from the Pentagon. Not between the Capitol and the White House, on, of all places, Constitution Avenue.
So I briefly thought Trump was finished. That assessment was fleeting. I'd written before Jan. 6, and wrote again after, about him coming back.
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It became obvious by 2023 that he could be president again, and I listed his plans for a second term. Most of what he's doing now was in the platform. His plans included a global trade war, which I started writing about more than a year ago. It's been more chaotic than expected, but it was coming.
After he won, I wrote that Trump would squeeze Canada on three fronts: trade, the border and military spending. And here we are.
I saw him nominated twice, inaugurated twice, come back from a shooting once, convicted once, and I spent so many hours seated behind him in a Manhattan courtroom that if you gave me a pen and a cocktail napkin, I could sketch from memory a patent application for that inimitable hairdo.
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The most important story is still unfolding. After his first-term near-overthrow of a constitutional republic, and his second-term stress-test on it, we're on the precipice of the previously unthinkable: the United States of America losing its ranking as a full-fledged democracy. I felt a disorienting melancholy as I typed those words in a story earlier this year.
Had I remained here through 2028, I'd have been covering Trump's story for 13 years.
A country of optimists loses faith
I'll never forget my first morning in Washington, in 2013. It was love at first sight.
On a morning walk north of Dupont Circle, I got John F. Kennedy's pollster on the phone for stories about the 50th anniversary of his death.
An elderly Lou Harris described how JFK had sent him on a secret mission to Canada, carrying a fake passport, to help Lester Pearson defeat John Diefenbaker. Foreign election interference? The Russians didn't invent it.
I received this oral history lesson while strolling about pastel-coloured Victorian rowhouses, and while it was almost December, it was as balmy as late summer, the trees still blazing red and yellow. I recall thinking, I'm never leaving here.
But now I am leaving. For a couple of years, at least. I'm going to get a master's in artificial intelligence policy, spend more time with my kids and join my wife on a diplomatic posting.
I got advice when I arrived here; now I'm happy to give some. There are little tricks for finding news that affects Canada. The U.S. domestic story presents a separate challenge. One day, you'll cover Trump courting a constitutional crisis; the next, he'll do something outrageous, controversial, the cable networks will be all over it, but it might be legal, even popular, and it's your job to figure out which story matters.
Good luck!
Also: Never forget that Trump didn't emerge in a vacuum. He identified problems Americans had concluded their political class failed to solve. Survey after survey shows Americans gloomy about the state of their country, and Trump found a receptive audience.
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A famously optimistic people has lost faith in its institutions. That celebrated ingenuity? It's fallen behind China in patents per capita. Life expectancy? Down, too. Note that areas suffering the most opioid deaths swung most heavily to Trump.
Because it's more impactful hearing this from one of Trump's supporters, I'll quote Tucker Carlson: "Happy countries don't elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do."
Trump set the tone by launching his political career 10 years ago this month in a speech laced with bigotry.
He promised renewed greatness if America stood up to three forces, all foreign: illegal immigration, trade deals and military spending overseas.
I became increasingly convinced Trump would win again as the election approached last year. I visited a bellwether district in Pennsylvania, talking to less politically engaged voters — working-class folks in an overwhelmingly Latino area.
They were upset about inflation. They weren't reading mainstream news. And they certainly weren't following the specifics about just who had stalled Joe Biden's agenda; they blamed the party in power, the Democrats.
Trump managed to reach apolitical voters like these. Democrats haven't.
The parts of the country that are politically engaged are hyper-polarized, and I got to report on the different poles.
I spent time with people on both sides of heated fights — the Canadian-connected Keystone XL oil pipeline; policing and crime; water rights; and migration. I've stood at the Mexican border, talking to families about their perilous journey. I've also walked that desert with members of a militia clutching AR-15s, and heard from locals fed up with illegal crossing.
I only experienced hostility once. In the runup to Jan. 6, outside a Trump rally, a supporter started swearing, pulling middle fingers, trying to rile up the crowd as reporters boarded the media bus, shouting: "Fake news! Hey everybody, it's the fake news bus!"
That was it. It's the only hostility I encountered in 12 years as a reporter in the U.S. I never encountered any as a Canadian — just one yappy guy at a hockey game.
A story to remember
My favourite story involved a road trip. The country was reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccines were being distributed.
And I visited a place I called the fertile crescent of American song, a small sliver of geography that gave the world the blues, rock 'n' roll and country music.
The musical soil was sprouting back to life in a Mississippi blues joint, in Elvis Presley's first recording studio in nearby Memphis and on the Grand Ole Opry stage in Nashville.
It wasn't an entirely happy story — it rarely is. COVID wasn't over. But this was mostly joyful. It was about humans doing their thing again, in a language without borders.
It's an extraordinary country. I won't pretend I'm not worried about it. But I'm pulling for it.
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Oh, wait, sorry. I'd planned to end my piece right there but just remembered something I feel compelled to add.
I am emphatically not rooting for the United States on one specific front: international ice hockey. In that domain, I crave its defeat, and that's exactly what happened as I watched February's Four Nations final from New Orleans.
A funny thing occurred, though. I received celebratory texts from American friends and neighbours. A couple said they were rooting for Canada — they didn't like our country being insulted, and wanted it to win.
I never put that in a news story. But I thought you should hear it. It's a big, complicated country, with people who defy clichés. You won't see them all on TV, but they're every bit as American. And they're still there.