Trump said D.C. has become sad since he left office.

“Nah, nothing’s changed here since he left,” chuckled Nathan Young, one of the deans of 2nd and D, a corner that former president Donald Trump’s motorcade rolled past on the way to his arraignment last week.

People gathered there had heard about the impressions Trump, after facing charges in federal court, had shared about the trajectory of the nation’s capital since his 2021 departure.

For Washingtonians, the Trump indictment is personal

“This is a very sad day for America, and it was also very sad driving through Washington, D.C., and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” Trump said at an airport news conference after his court appearance. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see it.”

The truth? He saw no more than a few blocks on his drive that day (I confirmed the route with someone who rode with the motorcade). The route did take him past Young’s sometimes home in one of D.C.'s oldest shelters — one that President Ronald Reagan helped rebuild — and one that Trump never visited when he was in office.

He seemed to hardly spend any time across the city in those years.

Unlike past presidents who had a favorite Tex-Mex place (George W. Bush), a go-to fast food stop along a city jogging route (Clinton), or treasured date night restaurants (Obama), Trump rarely ventured outside the White House or his hotel down the street.

On Thursday, Trump’s motorcade left the Virginia airport named for one of the GOP’s most lionized men, and rolled past the Mount Vernon trail along the Potomac, full of picnickers and bikers. (As far as we know, no Virginia cyclists flipped him off this time.)

She flipped off the presidential motorcade and lost her job for it

Then he crossed Memorial Bridge, where he may have caught a glimpse of the Wharf, D.C.’s luxe, new waterfront development. Did he see Philippe Chow, the glamorous new restaurant (a favorite of Rihanna’s in New York), or the Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen or the Pendry boutique hotel? All of them opened since he left D.C.

Once across the Potomac and in D.C., the motorcade did a short run along the unremarkable freeway into the 3rd Street tunnel, which took them underground, beneath the U.S. Capitol grounds, where most of the action on Jan. 6, 2021 began. Perhaps he was too busy to look up, as he prepped for his court appearance on charges related to efforts to overturn his 2020 reelection defeat.

When it emerged from the tunnel, the motorcade rolled for about four minutes — less than half a mile — over Washington streets before they went back underground, into the parking garage beneath the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse.

Trump was sitting in the rear passenger side of his car that day, so the only real glimpse of D.C. he saw out of that window was the corner of 2nd and D streets, Northwest.

“This corner’s looked like this for 25 years,” Young, 60, told me, of Trump’s comments. “Where’s he been?”

Being arraigned in New York and Florida. Meanwhile, the city was left laboring to clean the mess Jan. 6 left behind, which goes far beyond the $3 million in damage done that day. We spend millions more on riot fencing now required for gatherings, and our criminal justice systems have been clogged with the cases of hundreds of rioters.

Some things have improved. The Washington he left was a land of riot fencing and razor wire, with National Guards on street patrol. We were still in pandemic lockdown, and our economy was cratering. But D.C. remains perpetually on alert for unrest while grappling with problems old and new.

In the swath of D.C. he derided Thursday, people are ensnared in an imperfect solution to one of them — chronic homelessness. The corner is home to the 1,350-bed Community for Creative Non-Violence shelter, one of the largest in the nation and once called the “model shelter” by the Reagan administration, which begrudgingly supported it in 1984 after the encampments of unhoused activists and Vietnam War veterans became known as “Reaganville.”

I remember racing over there as a crime reporter when a woman was found dead outside the front door, when fights broke out and violence marred the chances for many who wanted a bed. And I remember the thank yous the hockey kids got when they brought platters of leftovers to the men and women outside and the stories from folks who said the shelter saved them.

There are a couple of recliners on one side of the block next to a makeshift scooter repair center, made up of tools laid along the curb and mechanics on their knees and backs, tinkering. There’s a volunteer group giving away cold bottles of water. This was the scene that Trump and the crowds there to greet him saw that day.

“They had all kinds of signs, and people were yelling at the cars passing by,” a man with Pac-Man tattoos on his forearms who asked not to be named said. “Supporters, too. A lot of them were there for him. You gotta admit, he has his supporters.”

The woman in the folding chair next to him rolled her eyes, and a guy using a scooter as his curb chair shook his head hard.

Pac-Man arms responded: “I didn’t mind it when he was in office. No better for me [with] any of them,” he said, of presidents. A guy trying to light a cigarette waved that dismissive grandpa wave at him.

“But to say it’s worse after he left?” Pac-Man arms said. “That’s not right. That’s not true. Nothing changed around here, no better, no worse.”

When Trump returned to his motorcade on Thursday, now a former president who had been thrice arraigned, the line of cars made a quick, one-block trip past the Department of Labor, back into the underground tunnel.

As they emerged from the tunnel and got back on the freeway toward the airport, the route had yet to show the graffiti he was talking about. Where was all this graffiti?

There were a few illegible Jersey barrier tags. And then, visible from that passenger window he occupied, was the only legible spray art I saw on that entire drive. One word that looked like: “Resist.” And that probably went up when he was in office.