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Trump’s second inauguration won’t showcase America’s strength, but its weakness

10 0
20.01.2025

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........

© Brisbane Times