Whenever I return from a vacation, I am usually happy driving back into Washington. The city always looks beautiful, no matter the weather, and it makes me proud to be a resident.

But yesterday, when we drove back from our 13 days away, I had a very different feeling. The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining, daffodils were blooming along Beach Drive near Rock Creek Park, and I couldn’t enjoy it at all. I felt burdened, and sad. The city seemed a tragic place, and anything I saw that looked like it was something new seemed to me that it was bad. Bad, bad, bad. Bad.

And then I thought about it. Everything that has happened since Donald Trump got into office has been bad. I can’t think of one good thing that has happened. And I, like everyone else, has not figured out what to do about it.

Watching MSNBC last night was so depressing (yet important to see) that I turned on Newsmax to see how they were reporting the news. Not for long, but long enough. I saw two things. First, I saw that even Newsmax could not help but noting that things were not really going swimmingly over the first six Trump weeks. And of course, even Trump realizes that. But that does not mean that they are admitting that mistakes have been made, or even that a single mistake might possibly have been made. Their response to Trump era problems are twofold: first, you can’t turn the Titanic on a dime. Second, it’s all Biden’s fault.

They had Tommy Tuberville on, the Alabama Senator who was clearly a better football coach than public statesman, and he spoke for several minutes talking about how it was just going to take time to move the country in the right direction because, after all, Joe Biden was such a terrible, corrupt, criminal and demented president, that unraveling what he did was not easy.

And then the host of the show (maybe his name is Michael Schmitt?) began talking about Joe Biden’s use of an auto-pen to sign various documents, showing identical auto-pen signatures and comparing them to a document hand signed by Biden. For Schmitt, this proves beyond a reasonable doubt, that Biden was too sick even to sign a document, showing that his dementia had made him a hollow president relying on the real president (an unidentified man, a Deep Throat from the Deep State), who was the real president during the Biden term. And, according to Schmitt, the use of an auto-pen to sign things (even Thomas Jefferson had one, right?) by Biden was perhaps the biggest scandal in American history.

And back to MSNBC. Showing a Republican House committee chairman calling newly elected Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride, a trans woman, “Mr.”, and insisting that he was correct in doing that. And then there is reporting that Donald Trump, having wasted money sending “illegals” to Guantanamo Bay (in Cuba) in shackles (to the tune of $16 million), has now brought them all back to the country, and is housing them elsewhere. He was under criticism for taking them out of the country, many calling it illegal. And now they are back.

In this regard, you may also remember a gloating Marco Rubio saying that El Salvador had agreed to house American prisoners in its 40,000 prisoner facility in the mountains of that country. Of course, no one has been moved there, and I am pretty sure no one ever will be.

And then there is Mahmoud Khalil, the supporter of Palestinian rights who strongly has opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza, and been a leader (making speeches, not doing anything physical) of the protests last year at Columbia University. He was arrested by ICE officials, even though he is a Green Card holder with First Amendment rights, without any charges being brought. He was then shipped out of New York to Louisiana, where he cannot communicate with his lawyers and where the government thought they would get a more sympathetic judge to defend against Khalil’s attempt to quash the arrest. I have read a fair amount about Khalil, and do not think he is a national security threat at all. But the government will argue that courts cannot review national security threats determined by the president.

Yes, there is more. There is the attempt to destroy the law firms of Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie, a few of whose lawyers assisted Special Counsel Jack Smith and others, by denying any of their lawyers security clearances, cutting off their representation of any parties whose cases involving the government which might involve matters of secrecy, and making it clear to clients and potential clients that hiring this firm would not help them reach a settlement in their cases. An apparent blatantly unconstitutional act, which would mean that any lawyer or law firm could be destroyed at the whim of a president.

The president yesterday went further in his destruction of the Department of Justice, and  fired half of the employees of the Education Department, and a quarter of the employees at NOAH. The Education secretary said that they didn’t fire any of the “best people”, and the leader of the employee union at the agency said that, basically, they fired the people of color and left the whites in place.

After there were firings at the Office of Personnel Management, where also all of the good people were left in place, including one young white woman who used much of her office time to create Instagram videos where she modeled and sold appropriate office clothing for the professional woman. This was shown by Rachel Maddow. It was not that different, I guess, from Donald Trump selling Teslas on the White House lawn. And, by the way, that heartfelt endorsement given by Trump might not have been heartfelt. He was reading it.

Then, there is the area in Louisiana, inhabited almost all by Blacks, where there have been decades of very high cancer rates, presumably because of a petrochemical plant in the area, and the law suit brought by the government against the owner of that plant. The lawsuit was apparently dropped today by the government, because it was viewed as a DEI lawsuit. Yes, you read that right.

Finally, there was Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office alongside Irish president Michael Martin, proclaiming that the EU was created “to screw the United States”, and that Chuck Schumer was no longer Jewish, but rather had become a Palestinian.

This is only a part of what I heard yesterday. Now, do you understand why I felt so blue coming home?