I Brought His Kids Their First McDonald’s Breakfast
Eric Swalwell, Broken Trust, and the City That Looked Away
It was the first week of the COVID lockdown, March 2020. Washington had gone quiet in that particular way it does when something is genuinely wrong — not performatively wrong, not politically wrong, but actually, frightening, we don’t know what comes next, wrong.
I went to the drive-thru and got McDonald’s Big Breakfasts because the restaurant inside was closed. Egg McMuffins, hash browns, the full kit. Drove them over to Eric Swalwell’s house. His kids had never had one. That detail stuck with me — a congressman’s children never had a McDonald’s breakfast. I thought it was charming.
I rang the bell. He came to the door. We stood apart, the way everyone was learning to stand in those first strange weeks. I handed over the bags.
That’s the image I keep coming back to now.
Eric and I were Covid friends. That’s a specific kind of close. When the world shuts down, and your social universe collapses to a handful of people you trust enough to be near — that’s not a networking relationship. That’s something more honest than most Washington friendships ever become.
We shared wine. We talked about what was happening to the country. On Friday nights, Stellina Pizzeria was our family ritual — the kind of restaurant that becomes a marker of a period in your life, the table you return to because the room feels like yours.
He was good company. Smart, funny, certain, he was one of the good guys.
I believed him.
Washington has known about Eric Swalwell for weeks. That’s the part that sits heaviest with me — not the accusations themselves, which are now in the hands of prosecutors in Manhattan and Alameda County, but the quiet corridor knowledge that preceded them. The rumors that circulated before the San Francisco Chronicle reported what it reported. The city that whispers and protects and waits.
This is what Washington does. It knows things, and it manages them. It weighs a person's political utility against the cost of accountability and makes a calculation. The calculation usually favors the powerful person. It usually favors the man.
The women who worked for Eric Swalwell were not making calculations. They were doing their jobs.
I’m not a prosecutor. I don’t adjudicate guilt. What I know is this: four women have come forward with accounts that corroborated elements of each other’s stories. His own senior staff called the reported behavior abhorrent. The Manhattan District Attorney opened a criminal investigation. House Democratic leadership — his own party — told him to end his campaign immediately.
I also know that someone who does what he is accused of doing — repeatedly, to women in his employ, over years — does not do it accidentally. He does it because he has decided that his needs matter more than their safety. He does it because Washington taught him he could.
That is not a man who made a mistake in judgment. That is a man who made a choice. Over and over again.
The table is where you learn who someone is.
Not the press conference table. Not the fundraiser table. The actual table — the Friday night pizza, the Covid morning with McMuffins at the door, the glass of wine when the news was bad, and you needed someone to sit with.
I sat with Eric Swalwell at that table. I brought food to his family during the most frightening weeks of our recent lives.
I was wrong about who he was. Washington was not wrong — Washington knew, or suspected, and said nothing.
That’s the story. It’s not just about one congressman. It’s about what this city decides to protect, and who it decides doesn’t matter enough to protect.
The women who worked for him mattered. They matter now.
The table I set for him is cleared.
James Bell is the publisher of The American Table, a subscriber-supported publication at the intersection of food, politics, and culture. He is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C.