Robert De Niro sat quietly in a corner. Just 15 feet away, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was on stage speaking. “You can have democracy or you can have wealth in the hands of a concentrated few. But you can’t have both,” Johnson said at Washington’s National Press Club on Tuesday night. The audience of 500 had assembled for the State of the Swamp, an event created to serve as counter-programming for Donald Trump’s State of the Union.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had just finished speaking about how concentrated wealth destroys democracy. “Unity isn’t uniformity,” he explained. “We are a country of great debates and disagreements.”
