What D.C. Saw at Donald Trump’s Second Inauguration

Over the inaugural weekend and late into Monday night, thousands of Trump supporters queued around the Capital One Arena for a victory rally, and dozens of balls and parties ushered the new Administration into the city. On the ninth floor of the Hay-Adams Hotel, which has a drop-dead view of the White House across Lafayette Park, Liz Truss, Sebastian Gorka, and Erik Prince mingled with guests trying to eat steak frites while standing up. In the basement of the Salamander hotel, by the waterfront, Kash Patel and Kari Lake were honored. At the Make America Healthy Again ball, a production company staged red-carpet interviews. “I’m very much of the mind-set that anything is possible,” I heard someone say as I made my way in. A theme of the evening was “Biohack Yourself.” A painting of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., holding a falcon was on display. Dr. Oz breezed by me. Inside the ballroom, Jewel performed, telling everyone she wanted to sing a song that captured how she was feeling. (She played a rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”) Upstairs, at the Waldorf Astoria, formerly the Trump Hotel, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s ex-fiancée, soon to leave for Greece as its next U.S. Ambassador, was sitting on a couch taking phone calls and adjusting her eyelashes.

I got drawn into a conversation with a man from Modesto who had a stack of Dark MAGA hats next to him on the bar. “I don’t sell supplements, I sell results,” he said. “A guy in a pizza shop bet me a thousand dollars that Trump makes the country worse.” He had watched the Inauguration on a live stream from the Capital One Arena; the typical outdoor viewing on the National Mall was cancelled at the last minute, owing to the cold. It had not been what he’d imagined. “It was just me seeing some shit,” he said. Eventually, Trump made his way to the arena to deliver his third speech of the day. All of them were variations on the long campaign yarns he’d been spinning for months, years. “It’s boring, but that’s the point,” the man from Modesto said. “Trump is pointing out all this shit that nobody pays attention to in the country.”