US presidential candidates are fond of talking about what they’ll do “on day one” if elected. Donald Trump is no exception.
Yet they routinely omit to speak – and apparently forget to think – of how they might use the almost limitless discretion that a president enjoys about how he does the one thing that he must do on the first day of his administration, namely to take the oath of office. In this, too, Trump is no exception.
President is free to choose where he’s inaugurated, where he works
Neither the US Constitution nor any federal statute requires a president to take his oath of office in the District of Columbia, much less at the western entrance to the Capitol building. No provision of the constitution or of any federal statute – including the statutory provisions codified at 36 US Code chapter 5, titled “Presidential inauguration ceremonies” – requires that there be either an inaugural address or an inaugural parade or an inaugural ball, much less that any such address or parade or ball take place in the District of Columbia. These are all mere traditions.
Past presidents repeatedly have taken the oath of office elsewhere than in Washington, DC. The first two US presidents, George Washington and John Adams, took the oath of office in New York or Philadelphia. On November 22, 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the presidential oath of office in an airplane taking him and former president Kennedy’s widow and still-warm corpse from Dallas, Texas, to Washington, DC.
Vice-presidents who have become president due to the death in office of elected presidents have invariably dispensed with inaugural parades or balls; their inaugural ceremonies have been the funeral ceremonies of their predecessors.
Furthermore, nothing in the US constitution or federal statutes in force requires a president to operate out of the White House or anyplace else in the District of Columbia. An executive mansion is provided for his convenience, but he need use it only as much as he may wish to use it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, afflicted with polio, died in office at Warm Springs, Georgia, enjoying the relief provided by that spa. He also built and used the first federally-funded presidential retreat, which was renamed Camp David by President Eisenhower.
Lyndon Johnson operated out of his Texas ranch as president so much of the time that it was called “the Texas White House.” Subsequent presidents have also spent much of their time in office at their private residences far from Washington, DC – Nixon in California, the younger Bush in Texas and, to an even greater extent, Joe Biden in Delaware.
Since the Covid scare US workers increasingly work entirely from home, part of an exodus from America’s culturally diseased, misruled and crime-ridden cities; Biden merits praise for leading that exodus by example.
Why Trump, if elected, should neither be inaugurated nor work in Washington, DC
There are compelling reasons why Donald Trump, if elected to a second term as president this November, should neither take the oath of office in Washington nor operate out of Washington.
First, Trump’s enemies repeatedly have demonstrated that they will attempt to convict him in federal court of any crime for which they can find a plausible excuse to prosecute him. It would be imprudent for Trump to assume that they will cease to be so inclined after or even during a second Trump term as president.
Alleged federal felonies are tried by jury in the geographical venues where they allegedly were committed. Alleged federal felonies allegedly committed in Washington, D.C., are tried in Washington, D.C.
However, the proportion of voters voting for Trump in the District of Columbia was far smaller than in any of the 50 states of the US in both of the most recent presidential elections. The DC figures were 4% in 2016 and 5% in 2020. Washington, DC, is more hostile to Trump than anyplace else in the United States.
Consequently, for Trump needlessly to continue to subject himself to the risk of trial by juries of residents of Washington, DC, would be folly. And if elected to a second term, he need not do so. He can operate as president anywhere he pleases. He need never set foot in the District of Columbia at any time during his second term.
Second, Trump has repeatedly promised since 2016 to “drain the swamp” – the swamp being Washington, DC, which was until the 1920s a malarial swamp that European diplomatic services considered a hardship posting. Although Trump’s usefully vague promise to drain the swamp means different things to different people, it is widely taken as a promise either to make the federal bureaucracy more responsive to the people, or to reduce its size and power, or both.
“Drain the swamp” is arguably the political slogan best loved by Trump supporters, far surpassing “Make America great again” in emotional resonance. One can hardly overstate the extent to which American populists have come to loathe Washington – not just the federal bureaucracy but the town itself.
That is due in part to Washington’s being an increasingly parasitic capital of an increasingly oligarchical polity. During recent decades, as the distribution of income in the United States has become markedly more unequal, the Washington, DC, area has been among the biggest winners.
Of the six richest counties in the US as measured by median household incomes in the 2020 census, four are suburbs of Washington, D.C: Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the US; Fairfax County, Virginia, the fourth-richest; Howard County, Maryland, the fifth-richest; and Arlington County, Virginia, the sixth-richest. The second- and third-richest counties in the US are in Silicon Valley, California. By contrast, in the 1990 census only two counties in the Washington suburbs, Fairfax and Howard, were among the six US counties with the highest median household incomes.
Washington now is reminiscent of Versailles in the 1780s, but Washington elites do not suggest that the rest of the country eat cake. Instead, they feed it a constant diet of lies, which also contribute to the growing loathing of Washington among populists.
Among these lies are the three-year-long FBI, CIA and media lies about the Russia hoax in 2016-19; denial that the presidential election of 2020 was more opaque and unaccountable than any other in recent decades; systematic distortion of the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; and systematic gross overstatement of the health risk posed by an infectious disease that killed less than half a percent of the population and killed chiefly people already close to death, accompanied by a hugely destructive and highly coercive response to that disease and palpable lies to conceal its likely origin in a Chinese laboratory funded in part by Washington bureaucrats.
Edifices in Washington that only a few years ago were generally revered as symbols of freedom and of hope, such as the Capitol and the White House, are now loathed by populists as symbols of tyrannical lackeys of a parasitic oligarchy concerned chiefly to maximize its access to cheap foreign labor at the expense of US workers, either by unrestricted trade with poor countries, or by unrestricted immigration from poor countries, preferably by both.
Meanwhile, a so-called “left” no longer concerned with differences of wealth or income but only with differences of race or gender deprecates the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial as shameful honors to dead white males who either owned enslaved Africans or would have preferred to send them back to Africa in the course of freeing them.
Little progress in draining the swamp was made during Trump’s first term as President. The bureaucracy continued to grow and the federal budget deficit mushroomed, in part because Trump lacked effective control of the Republican Party, which he was only beginning to transform from a fat cats’ party into a workers’ party. However, Trump’s control over his party has grown since 2020, and the prospect that he might make serious progress on draining the swamp in and after 2025 terrifies Washington.
One way to drain the swamp, increasingly favored by Trump supporters, is to move federal agencies out of Washington, where they form a large parasitic concentration of bureaucrats with their own local institutions and culture, and disperse them among the people whom they ostensibly serve, thereby preventing them from being politically or culturally dominant anywhere. Those who advocate this advocate it as a complement to ceasing to hire bureaucrats or making them easier to fire or cutting their budgets, not as a substitute for those measures.
The easiest way for Trump to convey that he is now serious about draining the swamp is to promise publicly – preferably in his nomination-acceptance speech – that if elected to a second term he will take the oath of office someplace far outside the District of Columbia. To take the oath of office elsewhere would be a largely symbolic measure, but it would be costless, and if Trump can’t muster the will to make a costless symbolic gesture of commitment to drain the swamp, why should anyone believe that he will fight hard in matters of substance to drain it?
To promise publicly never to set foot in Washington during his second term – save, perhaps, to free its political prisoners in person early in his term of office – would be a more substantive and more convincing way of conveying seriousness about draining the swamp.
The optimal second Trump inauguration
How might Trump promise to craft his inauguration to maximize the enthusiasm of his base, and to persuade the many Americans who despair of politics and hence never vote that he is not just another fat-cat politician?
Trump could promise to take his oath of office, deliver his inaugural address and host at least one of his inaugural balls in whichever state gives him the highest percentage of its popular vote. Folks in Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia who support Trump but don’t bother to vote because they know he’ll carry their states by a landslide would be given additional reason to vote for him, namely to have his inauguration held in their home state. That would tend to increase Trump’s popular vote tally.
Trump also could and arguably should promise publicly:
- to pardon all the January 6 prisoners “on day one” of his second term;
- to transport them back to Washington at his expense and as his guests on day two;
- on day three to don an orange jumpsuit and lead those former prisoners, all clad in orange jumpsuits, in marching from the DC Department of Corrections jail where they all were – and many still are – incarcerated, to Union Station, there to board a train that will take them all out of Washington to wherever Trump wants to hold an inaugural celebration with them; and
- never to return to Washington while President.
That parade on day three would be, quite literally, the Washington inaugural parade to end all Washington inaugural parades.
America no longer needs a physical political capital
In January 2017, about 300,000 people attended Trump’s inauguration. That was a small crowd relative to those that had attended recent previous inaugurations. Asked about the size of the crowd, Trump overstated its size – and kept on doing so even when confronted with contrary evidence.
Instead, Trump could and should have pointed out that 300,000 was an amazingly large crowd for an inauguration held in a town in which almost no one had voted for him.
Trump also could and should have asked why a town so unlike the rest of the United States should continue to be the country’s political capital.
Trump could and should also have seized that opportunity to ask why, or to what extent, a country with 21st-century information technology needs a physical political capital. The answer is: It doesn’t.
America no longer needs a physical political capital. England and France still need London and Paris, which are commercial, financial, intellectual, technological and cultural capitals as well as political capitals. But America no longer needs Washington, which is merely a political capital. Washington is a dinosaur, as technologically obsolete as the New York Stock Exchange.
A century ago, the best way to create a liquid market in financial securities was to build the largest possible room, cram it as full as possible with as many young men as possible, and connect those young men by telegraph and telephone to the rest of the world. That is no longer the case; most trading of financial securities is now electronic and has no single physical location. That is why the American Stock Exchange has closed, and why seats on the New York Stock Exchange sell for a tiny fraction of their prices forty years ago.
Most government work, including nearly all government management works, consists of exchanges of information and can now be done electronically over physical distance no less readily than can making bids to buy or offers to sell financial securities.
All Trump need do, to drain the swamp, is to show us that we no longer need Washington, that a large physical capital has been rendered obsolete by electronic information and communication technology. He could best do that by never setting foot in Washington throughout his second term as President. If that’s too gutsy for Trump, he could at least hold his inaugural outside the Beltway. Even that costless symbolic gesture would not soon be forgotten, keeping Donald’s name on the lips of schoolchildren long after one Big Mac too many has raised him to his reward.
