Arriving in Washington D.C. in April 2017, I was confronted with a gloomy atmosphere - coincidentally just three months after the swearing-in of President Donald Trump. Among the mass of global tourists across the great monuments of US politics, one could tell there was some morbid fascination with what had just happened. It made the seeming indifference of the less-politically inclined among them bizarrely refreshing.

Whatever one’s political motivations, it is often easy to project them and read the situation in a way that suits one’s existing world view. The shock at the election of Trump in 2016 was the epitome of this, exacerbated by the self-reinforcing bubbles of television, print and social media.

The election of Trump tore through this and made spectators, however temporarily, question the veracity of pundits’ conjecture and political polling. It remains to be seen what lessons will have been learned by the media and its consumers since then.

This short selection of images of the monuments against the grey backdrop serves a snapshot of the eerie milieu of the times.