He arrived in Washington with a target on his back and a city on his shoulders. In the West Wing, every polite question about budgets and grants doubled as a loyalty test: was he there to reassure the powerful, or to remind them whom they’d left behind? He didn’t disown the word they’d turned into a slur. Instead, he tried to translate it into something stubbornly material: shorter waits at bus stops, fewer sirens in the night, a landlord who finally answered the phone.

But the real verdict wouldn’t come from think pieces or fundraising emails. It would come from tenants who either saw a marshal at their door or didn’t, from public-housing residents whose elevators either worked or trapped them again. By the time the headlines moved on, the only question that mattered was brutally simple: did life get easier, or not?