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Like Ronald Reagan in 1985, Donald Trump is bowing to the elements and moving his inauguration indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, where only 500 guests can squeeze in to attend the ceremony. But that development isn’t putting a damper on the spirits of the tens of thousands of Trump followers who have traveled to Washington. Trump’s investiture isn’t so much an inauguration as a jubilant restoration, with the Biden presidency serving as an interregnum.
Will any of it ruffle Trump?
When I visited the Mayflower Hotel, located a few blocks from the White House, for breakfast at its “Edgar” restaurant — named after former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who lunched their every day with his chum (and inamorato?) Clyde Tolson — this morning to see a friend who is angling for a high-level post in the State Department, this venerable Washington establishment was pullulating with Trump supporters, some of whom were dressed in red, white and blue colors to celebrate the Great Man’s return.
Trump, who flew into Washington on a specially configured Boeing 757-200 bearing the words “United of America,” that was provided to him by the Biden administration, addressed an evening pre-inauguration rally at the Capitol One Arena, where everyone from the Village People to Kid Rock performed. It was a raucous event as the pent-up passions of four years of what Trump’s supporters see as non-stop belittlement, denigration and outright persecution come to an abrupt terminus.
At the same time, the Watergate Hotel served as the scene of a $20,000 per ticket gala dinner — the Coronation Ball held by Passage Press. Its claim to fame is publishing Curtis Yarvin, an intellectual guru to vice-president-elect J.D. Vance and an advocate of American monarchy. As my friend Sam Tanenhaus recently quipped to me, we are witnessing nothing less than the rise of “Social Yarvinism.”
The scurrying of the tech bros, ranging from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, to Trump’s side has its amusing elements — the latter suddenly throwing Sheryl Sandberg, his former chief operating officer, under the bus and pronouncing that he’s a foe of DEI programs. But it has also flummoxed and alarmed Democrats who are bemoaning the rise of a financial oligarchy, including Joe Biden who in his Farewell Address sounded the alarm about a “tech-industrial complex.” Too little, too late, declared Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a forceful critic of the Republican Party. “I pressed four years for this speech.” The rise of the billionaires in Trump’s orbit is also causing heartburn among the ranks of some of his MAGA followers.
That rabble-rouser par excellence, Steve Bannon, for example, has called Elon Musk “truly evil” and counseled him to “go back to South Africa.” He told the New York Times that the tech boyars are “techno-feudalists, and it’s a dangerous, dangerous thing. Here’s what I’m glad about. It’s going to be the populist-nationalist movement that’ll take them on and break them.” Like not a few presidents, Trump will preside over a ruling coalition with notable fissures in it. Reagan’s successes in domestic and foreign policy allowed him to accomplish that feat. His vice-president and successor, George H.W. Bush, was undone after he violated his “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge in 1990 and upset his disparate union of supporters.
Will any of it ruffle Trump? Forget high politics. He has his eye on other things. Even as Joe Biden shuffles off the stage, Trump is showing that in the pursuit of adulation he remains indefatigable. He’s holding a second rally after his inauguration at Capitol One Arena. “I will join the crowd at Capital One,” he declared, “after my swearing in.” If Trump knows one thing, it is that the show must go on.
