For many moons over the Potomac, the protocol for inaugurations has been as immutable and dignified as the words of presidents engraved on their monuments.
Leaders and luminaries would put aside their grudges and come together to celebrate democracy. This day marks the deepest conviction of the American experiment — that power must pass peacefully from one commander in chief to the next.
But what if you are coming to honor a man who tried to overthrow the government and steal an election? A man who riled up his followers to sack the Capitol and then lumbered out of town, a sore loser in a vile humor, skipping the inauguration of his successor?
Does he merit the usual privileges? Should everyone honor him in his moment at the center of the sacred traditions he desecrated?
When Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi blow off Donald Trump on his triumphant day, are they being rude and unpatriotic? Or are they justified, given his incendiary words, misogyny and racism, his defilement of this tradition at the heart of America?
The weather will not be the only bitter chill in town. Besides Michelle’s and Nancy’s cold shoulders, Barack Obama and the Clintons are skipping the inaugural lunch.
Trump is returning as a colossus. He has brought Washington — Democrats and Republicans — to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold “Trump” sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord. (This includes the C.E.O. of TikTok, who is surely hoping that his company’s sponsoring of an inauguration party and his online flattery about Trump’s 60 billion TikTok views will lead the new president to save the social media platform.)
But not everyone is looking forward to what’s in store.
It will be hard to forget Trump’s day of infamy, Jan. 6, as he gets sworn in at the Capitol, which was smeared with blood and feces by rioters recast by Trump and his acolytes as “hostages,” “patriots,” “tourists” and “grandmothers.”
The wintry cold is ordinarily part of the inaugural tradition. William Henry Harrison got pneumonia and died a month after his 8,445-word speech in March 1841. John F. Kennedy did his speech without an overcoat in a 7-degree wind chill. Ronald Reagan came in from the cold for his second inaugural. Trump posted on Friday that the “Arctic blast” would force the shindig inside, to the Capitol Rotunda. But given Trump’s obsession with crowd size, many wondered if he was just shivering at the thought that the weather would keep spectators away.
An X account belonging to a beloved D.C. dive bar, Dan’s Cafe, dryly posted about the shift to the rotunda: “Good thing his supporters already know how to get inside.”
Trump’s last inauguration was marred by his meltdown over crowd size; he called the National Park Service director the next day to press him to produce additional photographs of the crowds on the Mall after the agency shared photographs showing that Obama had a much larger crowd at his inaugural than Trump did. The one-day-old president also sent out his White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, to bluster falsely about how Trump’s crowd was the largest ever to witness an inauguration.
That set the tone for the highchair king’s first term: Reality must take a back seat to ego stroking — or else.
The mood in Washington is very different this time around. Instead of a rowdy resistance and a women’s march that drew nearly 500,000 here and some five million across the globe — an international swath of pink hats — we have Republicans who have gotten even more sheeplike and Democrats who still seem deflated and flummoxed, with no compelling ideas or pols to lead them out of the wilderness.
And this as Trump is surrounded not by advisers, generals and a daughter trying (and failing) to temper him but by fervent loyalists who will help him toss out executive orders the same way he tossed out paper towels in Puerto Rico, with no worries about who might be hit.
When she was trying to lure Joe Biden out of the race last summer, Pelosi said he had been such a consequential president, he belonged on Mount Rushmore. And Biden has made several speeches this week trying to buff his accomplishments.
But he will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again, despite a hail of impeachments, lawsuits, insults and lies and an attempted coup that put his vice president, lawmakers and police in danger.
The chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism.
A new Times article, “How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President,” reveals that Biden was encased in the same sort of delusional bubble as Trump. Mimicking Trump’s self-serving sycophants, Biden’s staff ginned up positive comments from allies to show the boss and protected him from negative stories.
Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it. But challenges to the Panglossian narrative about the president’s stamina and mental fitness were met with hostility. Jill Biden and advisers spun a Trump-like web of deceit around the White House.
Even Biden himself now admits that he isn’t certain he could have made it through four more years. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he recently told USA Today’s Susan Page.
But he persisted with his fiction that he was hale and hearty long enough to ensure that Democrats had no time to choose a ticket with a real shot at stopping Trump.
As Biden, baked in Washington tradition, dutifully follows the script on Monday, he should ponder what his legacy will truly be: resurrecting Trump.
