WASHINGTON: They planned for months, booking flights and rental cars, hotel rooms and Airbnbs, in the tens of thousands, mostly non-refundable reservations. They snapped up tickets to the inauguration, some 220,000 of them, and the lucky ones cadged invitations to exclusive inauguration parties and balls. For Donald Trump and his MAGA millions from across the country, his inauguration was going to be a party like never before.
Then Trump announced that an Arctic blast — which will dump snow on Sunday night and drive temperatures as low as -10c on the morning of the inauguration at noon on Monday — is pushing the spectacle indoors inside the US Capitol where only a few hundreds can be accommodated, which means place only for the VIPs and elites.
Left out in the cold, the disappointed MAGA flock is now making the best of the weather-driven debacle, casing the city for bars and restaurants to watch the spectacle on television. Many have cancelled their trips and are grumbling about the elites bowing to the weather on such a milestone for the movement. “Trump’s inauguration is being moved indoors due to the dangerously cold weather. At this point let’s just move it to Mar-A-Lago!” pro-Trump lawmaker Matt Gaetz joked.
Democrats are having a field day at MAGA disquiet with snarky gags. Among them “The great thing about moving Trump’s inauguration to the rotunda (the central hall of) is that all of his supporters already know how to get there,” a reference to the January 6 uprising when some MAGA elements stormed the Capitol.
Except this time only Trump VIPs will get to be at the rotunda. One daily published a photo of a forlorn Navin Adhari, a volunteer who was folding up chairs that have been laid out in neat rows in front of the Capitol steps, with the caption “Imagine being the guy who just set up 100,000 chairs on the National Mall and they announce they’re moving the inauguration.”
Even in the moment of MAGA triumph conspiracy theories abound. Some MAGA principals are suggesting that the real reason Trump was forced to move the inauguration inside is because of extreme security concerns. “Helicopters are scanning the area for ‘nuclear irregularities'” one Trump supporter wrote on X while another who defended the move indoors argued that the threat from drone attacks has reached unprecedented levels and all it takes is one small drone with poison on the end to take out any world leader.
There is as much attention on who won’t attend the inauguration as who will. Trump loyalists are excoriating Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi for skipping the event, forgetting that Trump and his family did not attend the Biden inauguration either. Others are finding joy in entertainers such as Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg, neither of whom are Trumpists, performing at the inauguration.
Some are still unhappy over the Trump surrounding himself with tech elites, of whom Bill Gates is the latest to talk up the MAGO Supremo, after a “long and actually quite intriguing dinner with him” at Mara Lago last week. Others are even more agitated over foreign tech honchos attendign the inauguration. “Why is the CCP affiliated TikTok CEO getting front-row access to President Trump’s inauguration? This is a national security threat and goes against everything MAGA stands for. TikTok has been labeled a danger to our country, yet its leadership is being welcomed during one of our country’s most significant events,” raged Laura Loomer, the incendiary Trump loyalist.