Jim McDermott, the retired 14-term U.S. representative for Washington state’s 7th Congressional District and current University of Washington affiliate faculty member, addressed a crowd of more than 200 Tuesday evening at the UW’s Kane Hall.
The event kicked-off a series of seminars that McDermott will present to UW graduate students, with discussion centered on expectations of Donald Trump’s presidency following Friday’s inauguration.
Before his Tuesday evening lecture, McDermott visited Seattle’s KOMO4 radio station, to chat about Trump’s inauguration and his graduate lecture series titled “The President’s First 100 Days.”
“A lot of people are making up their minds before he does anything, before he’s in office. He’s created that problem by assuming the presidency the day after the election. He’s been walking around acting like he’s president since election night, but he hasn’t done anything yet,” McDermott said. “My lectures after [Tuesday’s] will be about what’s actually going on in Washington, D.C., as viewed from the mind of a person who’d been there 28 years.”
Click here to listen to McDermott’s full interview, which also addresses Democratic lawmakers’ boycott of the inauguration and Trump’s disparagement of John Lewis, with KOMO’s Herb Weisbaum.
This article was written by Kate Griffith, a master’s degree student in applied international studies at the Jackson School.
