Washington expects temperatures of six degrees below zero next Monday at noon. The wave of polar cold that will freeze the capital of the United States starting this Sunday has led the president-elect, Donald Trump, to decide to celebrate his inauguration inside the Capitol, in the Rotunda, the room located under the dome of the Capitol. building.
There he will deliver his speech, in a space to which only the most select guests will have access, including the outgoing president, Joe Biden, foreign leaders, Trump allies and large donors, among them, predictably, the technology magnates and other billionaires whom Biden precisely has been described as a new “oligarchy.” Once he takes office, Trump will take a small mass bath in the Capital One Arena, the capital’s covered pavilion, with capacity for nearly 20,000 attendees.
The last time the inauguration was moved indoors was in 1985, when Ronald Reagan began his second term, a day when the thermometer showed 14 degrees below zero at noon. Forecasts for Monday point to the lowest inauguration day temperatures since then, below the two degrees below zero at which Barack Obama was sworn in in 2009, when a crowd braved the cold. On Monday it is expected that there will be minimums of 12 degrees below zero and maximums of 5 degrees below zero, with an even colder thermal sensation due to the wind. For Sunday there is a chance of snow.
“The weather forecast for Washington, DC, with the wind chill factor, could bring temperatures to severe record lows. There is an arctic wave sweeping the country. “I don’t want to see people hurt, or harmed, in any way,” Trump wrote on his network, Truth Social. “The conditions are dangerous for the tens of thousands of law enforcement, emergency services, police and even horses, and the hundreds of thousands of supporters who will be out for many hours on the 20th (in any case, if you decide come, dress warm!)”, he added.
The Trump campaign has rented the Capital One Arena so that the event can be followed on television screens. On Sunday Trump is scheduled to hold a rally on that same stage. After his oath and his speech, now as president, he will return there on Monday to join his followers. The presidential parade will also be held there, before Trump continues on his way to the White House. The dances and other closed-door celebrations called for the investiture are maintained.
The Trump campaign has distributed more than 200,000 tickets to watch the inauguration from the esplanade in front of the Capitol. Added to this are the free admission areas, further away from the building, where tens or hundreds of thousands more people were expected.
The expected cold discouraged attendance at the event. In 2017, Trump was enraged by news that fewer people attended his inauguration than Obama’s. That dispute was the origin of the so-called “alternative facts”, the phrase with the White House refusing to surrender to the evidence and denying that the falsehoods about a supposed record attendance at the event were a lie.
William Henry Harrison, then 68 years old, braved the freezing wind without a coat or hat at his inauguration in 1841. A month later he died of pneumonia. William Howard Taft, in 1909, was sworn in inside the Capitol during a heavy snowfall.
