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Inauguration Day in Washington, DC, is quite a spectacle. Back in the 2000s, I lived just off the National Mall. It’s a narrow, three-kilometre-long reserve that stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument to the US Capitol, which sits in the middle of its own 500 square metre block.
For Inauguration Day, the Secret Service erects a strong fence around the entire expanse. (It lay right outside the front door of my apartment building.) The incoming president is usually sworn in on the western front of the Capitol itself, and then traditionally, a parade or procession proceeds up Pennsylvania Avenue, which runs diagonally back up to the White House. (Monday’s event has been forced indoors because of freezing temperatures.)
Bill Wyman at George W. Bush’s second inauguration, January 20, 2005.
George W. Bush’s second inauguration was a little austere – the Iraq War was in full effect – but there was no mistaking the majesty of the occasion. Barack Obama’s watershed ascension on January 20, 2009, was, as you might suspect in overwhelmingly African-American DC, the occasion of a nonstop party for days before. The Mall was electric over the preceding weekend as news organisations built their broadcast booths and the park service set up giant screens stretching back more than a mile. On election eve, my neighbourhood, Penn Quarter, was filled with politicos, revellers, and souvenir purveyors overnight.
There’s no more meaningful moment in American life than the transfer of power on Inauguration Day. The outgoing president, a man who has seen and done things few can comprehend, sits patiently by as power is passed from him to a new person, who, chances are, will experience similar sober matters during his own term. That moment of calm, of course, radiates the solemnity of the security of American democracy and, it’s fair to say, the security of the West as well.
The author at Barack Obama’s first inauguration, which took place on January 20, 2009.
Meanwhile, of course, more mundane transfers are occurring. The night before Bill Clinton was sworn in, a woman I knew – who was a low-level Democratic Party functionary in 1993 – was told to report to the White House the next morning. Right at noon, she and some others were admitted to the grounds and taken to a hushed and empty West Wing to begin answering phones for the new administration.
Unfortunately, all that has gone to hell over the past eight years. Trump’s first inauguration was sparsely attended; his speech was deranged and fantastical. (This was the one about “American carnage”). His weeks of bluster following that momentous day were cheapened by his absurd lies about the size of the crowd on the mall.
Four years ago, of course, the US Capitol was scarred and still being cleaned and repaired after a bunch of creeps had overrun it two weeks before. And Trump, the guy who instigated it all, pouting and ashamed, was fleeing the city in disgrace instead of doing his duty and being present to symbolise the peaceful transfer of power.
Trump and first lady Melania on parade after the 2017 inauguration.Credit: Bloomberg
Finally, this week, with Trump being unaccountably accorded that power again, the inauguration will be a symbol not of the strength of a democracy, but its weakness – a weakness that Trump has, it must be said, brilliantly exploited for his own benefit. So, it will be a day that is sober in a different way and accompanied by a touch of dread. There was room for doubt in 2017 about what sort of president Donald Trump would be. Today, eight years later, we have seen the sort of president he was – and the sort of ex-president he was as well.
Our question this time is this: Will the new administration be as chaotic as the first one? Looking at his proposed cabinet, the answer is a definite yes. Back during the Reagan years, The New York Times editorial board, assessing the administration’s baleful environment overseers, famously quipped they were the worst political appointees since Caligula tried to appoint his horse a consul.
This year, Trump is bringing a whole Star Wars cantina (described by character Obi-Wan Kenobi as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”) of weirdos into power, including a Fox News host with a history of public drunkenness, adultery, and mismanagement of small nonprofits … to run the Department of Defence, the world’s biggest and most complex bureaucracy.
So we focus on that, or Trump’s crazy public musings about annexing Greenland and all the other nonsense emanating from his transition team’s manoeuvrings each day. But are we missing something? There are other more worrisome signs. Reuters is reporting that Trump is already targeting some obscure staffing bureaucrats at the State Department; that’s a sign his bully boys might have some coherent ideas in mind – and replacements ready to roll on hand as well. There could well be plans to inflict significant damage on the Department of Education and other right-wing bugaboos, however frivolous the justifications. There’s worse: The first Trump administration didn’t have his bromance with Elon Musk, who has billions of dollars of business in China at stake. The first administration didn’t have that right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan either.
Trump doesn’t even have to be competent to help Russia overrun Ukraine. And it sure looks like Trump’s scepticism of TikTok has come to an end as well.
These are all matters that will have a tragic effect on America and the world, driven by someone who has made clear those aren’t his concerns. This Inauguration Day, we may be watching the dawning of a terrible new day for America.
Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of NPR in Washington, DC. He lectures in journalism at the University of Sydney. He can be followed on Bluesky @billwyman.bsky.social
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