Heartburn was the order of the day at Washington, D.C.’s Union Pub on Thursday morning. By 10:30 a.m., patrons were already downing old-fashioneds and steaming bowls of chili, watching televisions in near-silence as the fired director of the FBI, who was speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee just a few blocks away, stopped just short of implicating the president of the United States in an obstruction of justice.
The pub had promised customers a free drink for every time Donald Trump tweeted about James Comey during the hearing, drawing a couple hundred residents and tourists to pack the Capitol Hill bar and fill a covered patio by the sidewalk. Out front, projectors cast sun-bleached video onto giant screens that customers squinted to see. Inside, a dozen TVs all tuned to Fox News blared loud enough to be heard over the shhhhhhhs that started every time a table got too chatty. These people did not come to fraternize. They were here to witness the mechanisms of democracy—to see whether the checks would check and the balances would balance.
“I figured I’m either going to watch it get better or watch the country go down in flames,” said Autumn Nance, a 23-year-old graduate student in George Washington University’s public health program. “And I figured either way, I should have a drink in my hand while I do it.”
Nance and her classmate Max Souders paid for their first round of whiskey drinks, since Trump’s Twitter feed was uncharacteristically quiet on Thursday morning. They’d decided on Wednesday night that a bar pouring free drinks was a place they wanted to be during a hearing that might end up inching the president toward impeachment, an end they both support. “I know he’s under oath, but still, I love that Comey’s coming out guns blazing, all sassy this morning,” Souders said. “It’s great to hear somebody from government who’s nonpartisan just flat out say what everyone knows”—that Trump tried to persuade Comey to drop the FBI’s investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
With the monotonous hum of legislator-speak coming through the sound system and an audience of rapt young professionals pressed blouse-to-button-down the entire length of the bar, the scene at Union Pub felt like a cross between a totally lit college lecture and overflow seating for the world’s most boring concert. “It’s the nerdiest, most amazing thing you could do in D.C., ever,” said Matt Gang, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who’s looking for work in international affairs. “I couldn’t think of a more D.C. thing than having brunch while watching CSPAN testimony. I don’t know if there’s going to be a bombshell today, but if there was, it would be cool to say that all of D.C. went to a bar to get free drinks if the president tweets.”
The crowd got livelier as the testimony got more brutal for Trump. When Comey made an unflattering remark about the president, noting that he’d never felt the need to keep encyclopedic notes of each conversation he’d had with Barack Obama, the crowd let out a gleeful ooooh in unison, like their teacher had just sent a troublemaker to the principal’s office. “Yeah, cover your ass, Comey!” one woman in a shift dress cried when Comey testified that he did write detailed reports after every time he spoke to Trump. Comey’s quip that he wished there were tapes of his conversations with Trump, as Trump has threatened, got a big laugh. That was “the equivalent of a touchdown,” according to Gang.
Gang is a longtime Democrat who came to the bar with a friend who’d recently left the GOP in protest of Trump. He joined in a round of applause that broke out after Comey testified that there was “no fuzz” on the fact that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. “Honestly, he’s being a lot more candid than I would have thought,” Gang said. “Today is a good lesson against firing someone who has a gun to your head.”
Out on the patio, 50-year-old James Johnson, a plainclothes Metropolitan Police Department officer on his lunch break, had a burger and fries with his eyes on the screen. Johnson keeps up with politics, he said, but “sometimes I have to slow it down, because it’s just so much information daily.” He wasn’t going to miss the hearing, though. “Trump does a lot of questionable things,” Johnson said, “and I’m interested in finding out more about what’s going on with the way he’s leading us.” A few tables down, Sean Jeffries, a 49-year-old New Orleanian in town for D.C. Pride and Sunday’s Equality March for Unity and Pride, sipped a drink in rainbow jewelry. He’d turned his week in D.C. into a jam-packed political jaunt. In addition to planning for the march, Jeffries and a few friends had met with their senators to advocate for local environmental concerns. Now, Jeffries said, he was “watching history take place.”
Watching the overburdened and rather heroic Union Pub servers push through the throngs with platters of drinks and totchos (nachos, but tater tots), Rocky Twyman, 69, stood on the sidewalk holding up a hand-lettered poster. “Stop. Join me in prayer for President Trump and America,” it said. “Pray 3 times a day—URGENT.” Twyman is affiliated with Pray at the Pump, an activist group that started in 2008 to ask God for lower gas prices. (Their prayers were answered.) “I’m here to tell all these people that all this drinking won’t do nothing,” Twyman said. “We need divine intervention right now. I’ve never seen this kind of confusion, and I was in the Civil Rights Movement in the ’60s. Trump is trying to take away everything we went to jail for.” Twyman and his cohort started their Comey-pegged protest outside the Capitol Thursday morning, but Twyman got hungry, so made his way to Union Pub. He figured he’d try to convince some of the Comey hearing viewers to trade their beers for meditation and prayer while he was there.
There weren’t any visible signs of patrons appealing to higher beings at Union Pub, but there was a common thread of cautious hope that the testimony they were straining to hear might just move heaven and earth. “I called my mom last night and told her, ‘Imagine if you could have been at a bar with your friends when Watergate was happening,’” Nance said, stirring her cocktail. “That’s what this is like.”
