Leave Washington DC High and Dry
Washington DC is an anachronism and, with the Democratic Party having gone totally rogue at present, it has become a dangerous anachronism. US Sen. Rand Paul and his wife were nearly killed by a lunatic Democrat mob with the full blessings of Washington DC’s lunatic Democrat mayor, as they attempted to get back to their hotel from the RNC convention. Not only is there no excuse for that but, with present technology, there is absolutely no need for anybody to have to put up with it. We have entered a new age of adequate and more than adequate bandwidth.
The US capital should probably be made into a museum. Why should anybody living in Nebraska for instance, want their US senators living and working full time in Maryland or Virginia or D.C. with lobbyists working full-time to bribe and influence them, while they are largely out of reach to their constituents in Nebraska? Nothing in private industry works that way anymore other than factories; every other sort of business is now conducted via Zoom, Discord, Live-Meeting, Go-2-Meeting, Skype, Google Hangouts, and airplanes. The ONLY reason the US congress should ever need to be together in one place any more would be to declare war and, for that, they could rent out some NFL stadium for two days.
Likewise, throughout the Washington DC area, there are giant buildings which anybody would assume to be international headquarters of large corporations such as Sony or Honda. The companies that occupy those buildings are what are called “Beltway Bandits”, nothing more than contractors who do most of the work that actual government employees used to do.
Nor is there any reason for them to be located in or around Washington DC. A typical case in point would be the huge Deloitte building at Tysons corner Virginia. Most of Deloitte’s employees live and work in flyover country and the company mainly works with meeting software and airplanes. That is, that building is nearly empty most of the time with employees working from home; occasionally something comes up for which they all need to be around the Washington region and so they hop on their airplanes and the building appears to be occupied for a few days. It is far from obvious that the physical presence in the DC region is necessary for anything at this point in time or that a small handful of large buildings wouldn't suffice for the whole federal apparatus.
On the day that World War II ended, Washington DC was just a little southern town that nobody would have compared to one of our real cities. It still does not have the infrastructure to be a major metropolitan area. There is no central governing body for the DC region. Six or 8 inches of snow, which New Yorkers would laugh off, regularly paralyzes the region. The traffic in the region is nightmarish, nothing else in the nation other than for Los Angeles compares. There is one Major Hwy., 66, for which they charge a $35 toll to use inside the Beltway. In a WMAL interview a number of years ago, the sheriff of Fairfax County Va. stated that “If you are having fun in Fairfax County, you are breaking the law.” Moreover, there are multitudinous ways to break laws in the DC region, all of the police forces in the region are basically predatory.
A person looking up the word “hubris” on Wikipedia in future times will likely find articles about Fairfax County Virginia. The Imperial Palace they built for themselves behind the Fair Oaks Mall is larger than most state capitals and substantially more grandiose. Their new courthouse building in Fairfax Virginia resembles nothing so much as that super Nazi Party headquarters building that Albert Speer was going to build for Hitler after they won World War II.
Ordinary people living in and around the DC region have to deal with and pay for all this stuff and, for somebody like Donald Trump, there are the extra concerns of feral Democrats attempting to kill Republican politicians and local Democrats weaponising whatever powers they might hold against members of his administration, including Soviet style show trials conducted by rogue judges such as Emmett Sullivan.
So that finally, assuming that Donald Trump is reelected, he may come to the $64,000 question: “do I really need any of this stuff and, if so, for what?”
My own version of an answer to that question would be that there at least needs to be a threat on the table to move most if not all of the federal government into the hinterlands, and leave Washington DC high and dry, i.e. let Mayor Bowser be the mayor of a little Southern town, such as DC was in 1946.