Most Americans can name only one local politician from Washington, D.C., and that happens to be the city’s “mayor for life” Marion Barry, famously busted in 1990 for smoking crack in an FBI sting operation (“bitch set me up!”). In March, the city unveiled a bronze statue to Barry on Pennsylvania Avenue, and in many respects the city is still being shaped by Barry, who died in 2014.
Barry’s old council seat in Ward 8 is currently occupied by Trayon White, a Barry protégé who narrowly won an election against a Democratic opponent who outspent him 16 to 1. Last month White posted a video on Facebook blaming a late-season snow on the fact that the Rothschild family was manipulating the weather “to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.” We had been happily unaware that young anti-Semites (White is 33) still use the name Rothschild as synecdoche for wealthy Jews, but the Barry circle retains its capacity to surprise.
White was justly ridiculed and denounced. So in an effort to rehabilitate his image, he began spending time with local Jewish leaders, including a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with Rabbi Batya Glazer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
The visit didn’t go well.
White was shown a photo of a German girl wearing a sign around her neck that read “I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.” The girl is surrounded by stormtroopers and being marched down the street. White, according to the Washington Post, asked a nearby docent: “Are they protecting her?” When the guide explained, “No. They’re marching her through,” White argued, “Marching through is protecting.”
White left the museum about 45 minutes into the scheduled 90-minute tour and spent the rest of the time out on the sidewalk on his cell phone. His aides did finish the tour, though. When they were shown an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto, one of them asked if it was similar to “a gated community.”
It turns out Trayon White is perfectly suited to continue the late mayor for life’s legacy. He’s been in office for just over a year—and already he’s disgraced his city and himself.
