In Washington, there is a fine art to knowing someone without ever quite getting to know them.
A little like Up in the Air, where intimacy flourishes at 30,000 feet, only to evaporate the moment the plane touches down. Back on solid ground, you are practically strangers.
Which brings me to Halloween, that one glorious occasion when Washington admits that everyone is wearing a costume.
But in the Royal Court of MAGA, who is the real person? The one in the costume, or the one supposedly hiding underneath?
Katie Miller turned up at the White House Halloween celebration wearing a black skeleton hoodie. A skeleton in the closet? Well, hardly. In Trump’s Washington, quite a few skeletons have abandoned the closet and taken up residence in plain sight.
And sometimes, a foreign intelligence can step into the play. A new book is now alleging that foreign intelligence gained access to information from Jared Kushner’s compromised phone. Kushner and his lawyers emphatically reject as false and unsupported.
What is true? What is fiction? And who, exactly, is playing whom?
Perhaps Halloween is the one evening when Washington can afford to forget the distinction.
The costume ball has, in any case, returned to the White House, where even admission comes with its own little masquerade.
The Office of the First Lady declined some media accreditation requests from White House correspondents, with the rather charming proviso that those who failed to make the list could wait at the doors and perhaps be admitted if space permitted.
How very Washington.
There are those who are invited, those who are tolerated, and those who may stand outside in the hope that somebody important decides there is room for them.
A wonderfully efficient way of establishing the pecking order on the First Lady’s media list.
After all, in Washington, it is not enough to know who is behind the mask. You must also know who controls the door.
I wonder whether things were much different at New York’s Kit Kat Club, where Melania first met Donald Trump.
There is, however, one rather inconvenient detail that even the Office of the First Lady cannot control: the ballot box. And the beauty of democracy is that those correspondents left outside the velvet rope may ultimately have a say in who gets to stay inside.
President Donald Trump emerged from the South Portico of the White House on Thursday evening, accompanied by Melania Trump, who was holding the hand of a little girl. Several other children followed.
Above them, on the balcony, was an enormous full moon.
An artificial one, naturally.
Green and orange vines covered the portico. Pumpkins in white, green, orange and black lined the steps. Beneath the moon, the words Halloween 2026 gleamed in gold.
Gold, naturally. All perfectly on brand.
One would hardly expect the Trump White House to celebrate Halloween in anything less than its preferred shade of extravagance.
Which brings me to the midterms.
With five days to go before the elections, the capital has become one enormous costume party. And the two gentlemen attracting a remarkable amount of attention are not even on the ballot.
Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
One is president. The other used to be president. Neither seems particularly enthusiastic about allowing the other to have the last word.
And this week, their disagreement took an unexpected turn.
The Cheesecake Factory.
While campaigning for Democrats in Cleveland, Obama turned his attention to Trump’s architectural ambitions at the White House: the ballroom, the Rose Garden, the helicopter pad and, above all, the gold.
The gold seems to have caused Democrats particular aesthetic distress.
Obama suggested that Trump should have his own show on HGTV before delivering a line that was destined to travel far beyond the campaign rally.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Now, that is a good political joke.
It has the essential ingredients: an instantly recognizable image, a touch of the outrageous, and just enough insult to guarantee that the offended party will spend the next several days explaining precisely why it isn’t funny.
Which is more or less what happened.
Trump defended his renovations and, somewhat unexpectedly, the restaurant chain itself, reminding the world that the Cheesecake Factory was a very successful company.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went one better. He actually visited a Cheesecake Factory in Washington, where he managed to turn lunch into a political statement.
The White House produced a mock menu advertising Trump’s accomplishments. It even broadcast a lo-fi music livestream featuring an animated president outside the restaurant.
An entire political operation had apparently discovered a new national emergency.
Cheesecake.
Meanwhile, Obama found himself clarifying that he, too, liked the Cheesecake Factory. Indeed, as the father of two daughters, he had spent a considerable portion of their childhood in American chain restaurants.
And there we were.
Two presidents, one current and one former, engaged in a dispute about the interior decoration of the White House and their respective appreciation of a restaurant whose menu is approximately the length of a congressional spending bill.
I suppose there are worse ways to spend the final days before an election.
What makes the episode so wonderfully American, however, is that a joke about gold-plated presidential taste had somehow become a contest over who was entitled to represent ordinary Americans.
The question was no longer whether the White House had acquired too much gold. It was who understood America better. And that, of course, is a considerably more complicated business.
Washington has a peculiar relationship with authenticity.
Everybody claims it. Everybody demands it from others. And everybody seems positively astonished to discover that the person sitting opposite them may be performing a role.
Of all the things a president might ask the electorate five days before an election, Donald Trump has chosen one particularly appropriate to the Halloween season. He has asked people to pretend.
“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told supporters in Mississippi.
Pretend!
The president is not running for Congress. His name will not appear on the ballot. But he would very much like voters to imagine that it does. Obama, meanwhile, is back on the campaign trail, once again assuming his familiar role as Trump’s political antagonist.
And so we have the rather extraordinary spectacle of two presidents, neither of whom is a candidate, dominating a considerable portion of an election campaign.
The men and women actually standing for Congress occasionally risk becoming supporting characters in somebody else’s production.
Yet the consequences are anything but imaginary.
Control of Congress is at stake. The next two years of Trump’s presidency may unfold under unified Republican government or under a very different arrangement, with all the investigations, political confrontations and legislative complications that divided power can bring.
The masks have not come off. Yet. But the fittings for the next ones are already underway.
And why not?
Sometimes it is hypocrisy.
Sometimes it is politics.
And in Washington, the distinction can depend rather heavily on who wins the next election.
Which brings me back to the White House and its artificial moon.
Beneath a moon that wasn’t real, children arrived dressed as people they weren’t. And perhaps that was the most honest thing about the entire evening.
The children, you see, understood the rules perfectly. They knew when the performance began. They knew they were pretending.
And, most importantly, they knew that when the evening was over, they could take off their costumes and go home.
In Washington, the masquerade has a peculiar habit of continuing long after Halloween is over.
