TOI correspondent Washington: India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar will join an elite group of mostly right-wing foreign leaders who will attend Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th US President in a convention-busting event on January 20.
Like China’s President Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Modi is deputing his top mandarin on the landmark occasion, behooving the traditional non-partisan discretion both nations exercise. But leaders of several other countries, ideologically aligned with Trump, are themselves making a dash to Washington DC to revel in the rise of the right across the world.
Among them: Italy’s Georgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Mellei, and Hungary’s Victor Orban. Trump has also invited ideological journeymen like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who like him was voted out after a stint in power and claimed the elections were stolen.
The US Presidential inauguration is customarily a strictly domestic affair with no record of any foreign leader formally attending one in 248 years.
In fact, so insular is the ceremony, typically held on the steps of the Capitol in near-freezing temperatures at noon on January 20, that the State Department, lead agency for foreign interface, sent a letter to embassies ahead of the 2009 Obama inauguration saying “As in the past, foreign delegations will not be invited to Washington for this occasion,” after polite inquiries about a seat at the milestone event that saw the US elect the first black person to the White House.
But as with many other conventions he has torpedoed, Trump is set to toss this aside in a celebration of the right although there will be some unusual guests. Among them, El Salvador’s outlier president Nayib Bukele and Israeli settlement leaders .
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s attendance though is up in the air after Trump threw a social media grenade over the weekend when he shared post of public policy maven Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a b*tch” who has been dragging the US into endless wars in the Middle East.
Presidential historians are already chalking up notes to highlight this will be an unprecedented inauguration. Aside from Trump becoming only the second US president in history to serve non-consecutive terms, the event will also take place with US flags at half-mast to honor the passing of President Jimmy Carter.
Trump and his supporters have expressed disquiet at what they see as a petty action by the outgoing Biden administration although the US flag code prescribes lowering the flags to half-staff for a 30-day period after the death of current and former presidents. Flags were at half-mast at Nixon’s second inauguration after President Truman died in the weeks before.
Trump himself is piqued about the flag issue. “The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration. They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves. Look at what they’ve done to our once GREAT America over the past four years – It’s a total mess!” he complained last week.
“Nobody wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it. Let’s see how it plays out. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he added, in an indication that he will restore the flag after he is sworn in since the flag code is convention, not law.
Foreign attendees though will be more concerned about the weather than the flag. Inauguration Day, January 20, is typically wintry and cold although the oath of office is always set for noon. The story goes that William Harrison, the first US President to die in office, died of pneumonia a month after Inauguration Day where he delivered a two-hour speech and rode in an open horse carriage with no hat or overcoat, attending parties and balls in wet clothes.
Current weather forecast for January 20, 2025 shows a maximum temperature of 35F (2C) and a minimum of 19F (-7C).