Rats are ubiquitous enough in D.C. that nearly everyone has a story (or many) of a close encounter, not to mention an opinion or two about what the city should do about the rodent problem.

As The 51st reporter Sam Delgado worked on a story about D.C.'s recent efforts (coup d’rat?), we asked our readers to share their stories… in all their sickening detail. Read these tales (lightly edited for length and clarity) at your own risk. At least finish your lunch first. 

“One night, I woke up at 5 a.m. feeling something crawling on my back. I caught a glimpse of a rat falling into my laundry hamper and then running into my closet. I tried to find where it went, but couldn’t, so I got back in bed and eventually fell back asleep. In the morning, I found a tiny hole in the corner of my closet, and I packed it with steel wool and covered it with several layers of duct tape (which is all still there). I asked my landlord to send an exterminator, who looked around, found no evidence of any points of entry, and basically just said, ‘Call us back if you see any more.’”
— Ben

“My partner and I were returning home and noticed that the 10-gallon bucket we usually keep overturned was upright. When I went to flip it back, I saw it was full to the brim with water from recent rainstorms and that there was a bloated dead rat floating in it…  the smell! We got a shovel to scoop out Lil Bloatie, but when the shovel touched the carcass, it broke apart into a million little pieces: tufts of fur, bits of skin, unidentifiable organs, an eyeball. Every time we tried to scoop out rat bits, they broke into smaller and smaller pieces, and now we had a 10-gallon bucket full of water and rat bits… in the middle of a D.C. heatwave.”
— Stephanie

“I ordered DoorDash, but didn’t realize it had arrived for 15 minutes. I eventually brought it up to my bedroom for a late-night meal and opened the bag. I pulled one container out and a rat immediately jumped out and into my face before scurrying around the room. I couldn’t find where it went so I set traps and closed the door. I left my house, went for a walk to plan my next course of action. When I came back, I realized it had chewed a hole through my window screen and thanked god it was gone. Jarring experience. Maybe the wildest part is that the food bag was still stapled shut when I picked it up.”
— Anonymous 

“We had a couple of rats get into the basement of our old house in Columbia Heights but couldn’t find any obvious entry points to close up. It turned out that they had chewed a tunnel through the concrete to get in.”
— Michelle

“A week earlier, my friend had made a comment that she couldn't believe I wear tennis shoes after our beach volleyball games. I explained that the D.C. streets can get pretty gross, but, despite my better judgment, the next week I wore sandals. On the way to the Metro station, a rat not only ran across my bare foot, but changed directions, fully doing a 360 on top of my foot. It left a decent scratch and I ended up in urgent care with a tetanus shot and antibiotics. Which I threw up that night."
— Emily

(One thing we learned: Rats are regularly running across our neighbor’s feet! This one was the most detailed.)

“I worked at a restaurant many years ago and a rat ran under the tables and up a guy’s pant leg. He got up, shook the rat out, and stomped it to death in the middle of dinner service. My manager said nothing. Just put a bucket over it and slid it away.”
– Chrissy

“When my partner and I were first dating, we were walking along a city street in the evening. As we got closer, we saw an enormous rat sitting on the rim of the trash can. We paused, waiting to see if it would be startled and leave before we had to get closer to pass by. It did not leave. In fact, it looked us dead in the eyes. We eventually started slowly trying to walk by the trashcan without getting too close, and all of a sudden, the rat JUMPED STRAIGHT AT US! No physical contact was made, but it was a classic D.C. bonding experience that strengthened our budding love.”
— Georgia

“Years ago, on an evening out on U Street, I heard rattling in an alley as I was passing by. I peered down the alley and tons of rats started cascading like water out of a trashcan.”
— Caity

“Walking home from the 18th Street bars in Adams Morgan with friends, the hour was late and the lights were dim. We heard a horrible popping sound from just ahead. That particular section of the sidewalk was extra dark. My friend had stepped on a dead rat, exploding its bloated corpse. Heinous. An insidious memory.”
— Monica

“Rats ate through my trash can, removed the remains of a blue crab dinner, and left the picked-clean shells neatly arranged, as if taunting us, outside the hole to their burrow in our little yard.”
— Steve

“Rats invaded the tree box in front of my house in Adams Morgan last winter. I played whack-a-mole with dirt and rocks, and enlisted DC Health for abatement and poison assistance. A few corpses appeared, but burrow holes kept opening. So I went full on Caddyshack and flooded out the space with full hose strength. Nothing for close to a minute. I was despondent. But then about 8-10 baby rats broke through the surface in new places. I was disgusted. Until the 4-5 fat adults fled. But I ultimately didn’t accomplish anything other than spraying rats toward my neighbors. The only thing that solved the problem was destroying the tree box.”
— John

“I went to check my engine’s oil this March because I had been hearing a clicking noise. Found a large, dead rat in my engine compartment partly under the radiator and part under the engine block. I also found several chicken and rib bones on my splash guard where it had been having a snack.”
— Kate

“In our recently renovated rental row home in Petworth, we ended up with a full rat infestation. American Pest kept coming out and setting traps but they didn't seem to be improving the situation. They finally sent their district manager, and when he came to check the work, three rats ran across his hand. (He screamed.) … They finally sealed the house with chain-mail netting and metal sheets. But not before the day I was doing my makeup and, out of the corner of my eye, saw the hangers in my closet start to swing. I turned around and there were three rats sitting on my clothes rail. After we sealed the closet and the rest of the house, you could hear the rats every night throwing themselves against the metal for months and months.”
— Amber

“First night in a house in Columbia Heights, ground floor. Left my window with a screen open. Awakened at 2 a.m. to teeth chewing a two-inch hole through it.”
— Audrey

After 10 years of renting and street parking, we bought a rowhouse with private parking in the back. Less than a year later, rats chewed up a bunch of wiring in our car’s engine bay. It required a $6,000 replacement of the entire engine wiring harness and took about six weeks. (Luckily insurance covered it.) Three months later, it happened again. And now I street park!”
— Ian

“I live in Quebec House. If you know you know...”
— Lily

There’s more to foreign policy than being liked, but part of being a great power is dealing with the choice lesser powers face between bandwagoning with a strong country and counterbalancing against it.

For a long time, most observers have seen this as an underlying American advantage vis-a-vis China. Many countries that are geographically near the People’s Republic — notably Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — have expressed a strong and clear preference for an alliance with the United States of America in a way that has absolutely no counterpart among America’s neighbors. Even countries, like Vietnam, whose historical relationship with the United States was quite negative seem to prefer aligning with a distant and relatively benevolent United States to being under the Chinese Communist Party’s thumb.

But things have taken a pretty sharp turn lately. In Pew polling from earlier this summer, China is now viewed more favorably than the United States in a wide range of countries, including Mexico and Canada and most major European countries.

Some of this seems like polarization around Israel, with Israel itself expressing the most favorable views of the United States and a number of Muslim countries exhibiting the biggest gap in China’s favor.

But beyond the specifics of that conflict, I think this reflects the wider implications of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran.

The higher energy costs brought about by the war have been extremely unpopular domestically. But the economic impact abroad has been worse than the impact at home, and people globally are justifiably angry that as much as Trump has screwed his own constituents on this, he’s inflicted even more pain on them.

And then there’s the bizarre “bad neighbor policy” that has characterized Trump’s second term. Trump transformed Canadian politics with pointless threats to invade the country. He’s got European governments wargaming a fight with the United States over Greenland. Every few months he muses about invading Mexico to fight drug cartels.

None of this stuff is popular with American voters, but it’s also remote from their key concerns, so it gets less attention than purely domestic concerns.

Yet in terms of the long-term harm done to the country, torching America’s reputation with friendly countries for the sake of what mostly amounts to a gag should count among the worst of the Orange Man’s actions.

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The anti-Roosevelt doctrine

Teddy Roosevelt articulated the view that the United States ought to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” letting the objective realities of American power speak for themselves while presenting a friendly face to the world.

Trump has done something like the reverse, engaging in maximum bluster while in practice having little interest in anything other than personal corruption and his White House ballroom.

That’s how we end up in bizarre situations like a feud with the government of Italy that started with him bragging for no reason that Giorgia Meloni “begged” him for a bilateral photo op. There’s no actual dispute between the United States and Italy, no real conflict of interest, and Meloni and Trump are pretty like-minded in their approach to domestic politics. Trump is just a jerk who seems like he has trouble with women and never wants to apologize for anything.

Trump is funnier and more entertaining than the average politician — there’s a reason he was a successful reality-television host. And even though becoming president is more impressive than hosting “The Apprentice,” there’s a strong case that the ratings of “The Apprentice” relative to other shows were a good deal more impressive than his approval ratings relative to other presidents.

I think this is why he gets really into these bits like calling Justin Trudeau “governor” of Canada or dispatching JD Vance to Greenland. I’d like to say in a very serious tone of voice, “But there’s nothing funny about the central pillar of the Western alliance acting like a petty bully.” In truth, though, it is kind of funny — it’s just also really bad.

Different jobs come with different responsibilities, and one of the responsibilities of the job of being president is to act in a dignified and appropriate manner, not provoke international incidents for the lulz.

The price of war

Something Trump does not seem to have considered is that some leaders take their jobs more seriously than he does.

After the audacious gambit in Venezuela paid off, Trump seems to have convinced himself that every regime is as hollow and corrupt as Maduro’s. He figured that after he killed a few top guys, whoever was left in Iran would cut a deal. That didn’t work, and he’s been floundering ever since.

The ensuing war has been a big deal for Trump politically because it has pushed up the cost of energy in a way that infuriates voters.

Notably, though, the United States is a net exporter of oil and oil products. So while the supply shock is still on balance bad for the American economy, it really is a balance. Increased domestic production and energy income partially offset the harm of higher prices and mean that the impact on the American economy is much milder than the impact on countries that import all or most of their oil.

With natural gas, we’re even more insulated. There are physical limits to how much gas can be exported from the United States because only so many liquefaction facilities exist. As a result, there are basically two separate gas prices: the price of gas that can be obtained via pipeline from American fields and the higher global price of liquefied gas shipped by sea. Limited pipeline capacity in the Northeast means that New England relies on seaborne gas and has to pay the global price. But most Americans are basically protected from the supply disruption.

Trump periodically tries to make this point, arguing that “we don’t need the Hormuz Strait” because the United States does not import oil and gas from the Middle East.

That’s not quite right. The global price of oil still influences American prices, and the global price of gas influences prices in part of the country. But he is correct that the price Americans are paying is much lower than the price being paid by people in Thailand or the Bahamas.

What Trump doesn’t quite seem to grasp is that this makes his policy look much worse.

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After all, Americans are incredibly angry about what this war is doing to their pocketbooks and their economy, and Trump is correct to say that other people are suffering much more dramatically than we are. That’s real rogue superpower behavior. You’re sitting around in Chile or Bangladesh and, out of nowhere, your economy is being ravaged by some shit the American government started that you had no say in, and the president is actually bragging about how he’s better off than you.

The helpful Chinese

One point in the hawks’ favor is that global oil prices have actually spiked less than most observers (myself included) initially assumed they would.

It seemed like reducing global oil consumption by enough to make up for the lost output would require world prices well over $100 per barrel on a sustained basis. Why hasn’t that happened?

Well, China has dramatically cut oil imports, single-handedly absorbing 74 percent of the total global reduction in imports through a mix of rationing and drawing down its existing stockpiles. The Chinese government is a repressive autocratic regime, and so we never get really clear reporting on exactly what their thinking is. They surely have their own reasons for reacting this way. But the upshot is that while the United States has inflicted great economic harm on various countries around the world, China’s extraordinary steps have limited the harm to much less than initially expected.

So you have Trump picking pointless fights and making people mad for no reason and then plunging the world into a dire economic situation. Meanwhile, China is actually taking constructive action to improve things.

China has also been flooding the world with what seem to be affordable, high-quality electric cars, which is good for the environment and for the economic health of oil-importing countries. I’ve defended the logic of the Biden and Trump administrations’ efforts to keep these cars out and prevent China from totally dominating the global automobile supply chain.

But to pull this off — or to achieve the comparable goal of preventing Chinese companies from dominating artificial intelligence — we need other countries to cooperate with us.

And that won’t happen if the United States is slapping tariffs on everyone left and right in a totally unprincipled way. It’s not a remotely compelling pitch!

Trump mostly makes America look like a joke, but to the extent that we are not a joke — and certainly our frontier A.I. labs are no laughing matter — he’s made American primacy look alarming to the point where few countries welcome it and a majority seem to prefer our rival.

This is, rightly, not what Democrats are going to be campaigning on this fall. But on the merits, it’s easily one of Trump’s most egregious failures.

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