It has become the topic of the season at Washington dinner parties and receptions — Where would you go if it really happens?

Portugal, says a former member of the Congress. Australia, says a former agency director. Canada, says a Biden administration official. France, says a liberal columnist. Poland, says a former investigator.

They’re joking. Sort of. At least in most cases. It’s a gallows humour with a dark edge. Much of official Washington is bracing for the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump really could return — this time with “retribution” as his avowed mission, the discussion is where people might go into a sort of self-imposed exile.

Whether they mean it or not, the buzz is a telling indicator of the grim mood among many in the nation’s capital these days. The “what if” goes beyond the normal prospect of a side unhappy about a lost election. It speaks to the nervousness about a would-be president who talks of being a dictator for a day, who vows to “root out” enemies he called “vermin”, who threatens to prosecute adversaries, who suggests a general he deems disloyal deserves “DEATH”, whose lawyers say he may have immunity even if he orders the assassination of political rivals.

“I feel like in the past two weeks that conversation for whatever reason has just surged,” said Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who became a vocal critic of the former President. “People are feeling that it’s very obvious if a second Trump term happens, it’s going to be slash and burn.”

That’s all fine with Trump and his allies. In their view, Washington’s fear is the point. He is the disrupter of the elite. He is coming to break up their corrupt “uniparty” hold on power. If establishment Washington is upset about the possibility that he returns, that is a selling point to his base around the country that is alienated from the people in power.

Washington, of course, has never been fertile Trump territory. He won just 5 per cent of the vote in the nation’s capital in 2020, and it is hardly surprising that the governing class is unsettled by attacks on “the deep state”. Even many Republicans in the capital are nervous about Trump. The District of Columbia has so far been the only place other than Vermont to support Nikki R. Haley over Trump in this year’s Republican primaries.

But Trump’s flirtation with authoritarian figures and language has raised the spectre of a Washington vastly different even than during his first term, when he was at times restrained by establishment Republicans, military officers and career civil service officials who are less likely to surround him in a second. His rhetoric this time around has centred more than before on power and how he would increase it and use it if he won again.

“The rest of America may not take what he says seriously,” said former Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, “but I think you’re hearing the
uncomfortable chatter in Washington among Democrats and Republicans because they understand having worked with him in the past that when he says something he means it.”

New York Times News Service