US national candidates enjoy gushing about their plans “on moment one” if they are elected.  , Donald Trump is no exception.
Still they frequently omit to mention how they might apply the almost unlimited discretion a president enjoys when it takes the oath of office, which they must do on the first day of office, and how they seem to forget about it. Trump is no exception in this regard, either.
President is completely to decide where he’s inaugurated, where he works
A president’s oath of office is not required by the US Constitution or any other federal legislation, significantly less at the Capitol building’s western access. No provision of the Constitution or any federal legislation, including the legal provisions titled” National opening ceremonies,” which are codified at 36 US Code book 5, is required that there be an inaugural address, parade, or basketball, much less that any such address, parade, or ball take place in the District of Columbia.  , These are all simple practices.
Wherever previous leaders have taken the oath of office, not just in Washington, DC, has been the case. In New York or Philadelphia, the first two US president, George Washington and John Adams, took the oath of office.  , On November 22, 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the political oath of office in an aircraft taking him and former leader Kennedy’s lady and nevertheless- hot corpse from Dallas, Texas, to Washington, DC.
Vice-presidents who have been elected president have always preferred to have their annual parades or balls as their funeral ceremonies have always been their predecessors.
Additionally, no provision of the US Constitution or current federal statutes mandates that a leader run from the White House or anywhere else in the District of Columbia.  , An senior palace is provided for his pleasure, but he had use it just as much as he may wish to apply it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had smallpox, passed away in his office in Warm Springs, Georgia, energizing from the comfort offered by that spa. Additionally, he constructed and used the first national retreat that received funding from the federal government, which President Eisenhower renamed Camp David.  ,
Lyndon Johnson’s Texas house was called” the Texas White House” because it was frequently operated from there as leader. In addition to Nixon in California, the younger Bush in Texas, and Joe Biden in Delaware, later leaders have spent a lot of their time in office away from Washington, DC.  ,
Biden deserves praise for leading that migration by example because the Covid scares US workers who increasingly work completely from home, a result of an exodus from America’s culturally disenchanted, misruled, and crime-ridden cities.
Why does Trump not been inaugurated or operate in Washington, DC if he is elected?
There are powerful causes why Donald Trump, if elected to a second term as president this November, may either take the oath of office in Washington nor run out of Washington.
Second, Trump’s enemies have consistently demonstrated that they will try to sue him in federal court for any crime for which they can come up with a plausible justification. It would be foolish for Trump to believe that they will stop being thus inclined after or even during a second term as president.
Alleged federal crimes are tried by judge in the physical locations where they reportedly were committed. Washington, D.C., is where all alleged national crimes are tried in
Yet, in both of the most current national elections, a much smaller percentage of voters in the District of Columbia cast ballots for Trump than in any of the 50 US states. The DC numbers were 4 % in 2016 and 5 % in 2020. Washington, DC, for example, is more angry to Trump than any other city in the country.  ,
Thus, for Trump further to continue to issue himself to the risk of test by courts of occupants of Washington, DC, would be folly. And if he is elected to a second word, he must not do so. He can serve as chairman wherever he pleases.  , He had not set foot in the District of Columbia at any time during his next term.  ,  ,  ,  ,
Next, Trump has consistently promised to “drain the marsh” since 2016– the marsh being Washington, DC, which was until the 1920s a pathogenic swamp that Western diplomatic services saw as a hardship posting.  , Although Trump’s best vague promise to drain the swamp means different things to different people, it is frequently taken as a promise either to make the national bureaucracy more adaptable to the people, or to minimize its size and power, or both.  ,
In terms of emotional resonance,” Drain the swamp” is unquestionably the political slogan most favored by Trump supporters, far outperforming” Make America great again.”  , One can hardly overstate the extent to which American populists have come to loathe Washington– not just the federal bureaucracy but the town itself.
Washington’s continued dominance of an increasingly oligarchical polity is partially attributable to this. The Washington, DC, area has been one of the biggest winners in recent years as the distribution of income in the United States has become markedly more uneven.
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. Silicon Valley, California is one of the second and third richest counties in the US. In contrast, only Fairfax and Howard, two of the six US cities with the highest median household incomes, were included in the 1990 census.
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 contribute to populists ‘ growing dislike of Washington.
The FBI, CIA, and media lies about the 2016 election’s Russia cover-up, the systematic distortion of the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the systematic gross overstatement of the health risk caused by an infectious disease that killed less than half a percent of the population and killed chiefly those already close to death, accompanied by a massively devastating and highly coercive response to that disease, as well as palpable lies concealing its likely origin in a Chinese laboratory funded in part
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” who is no longer interested in differences in wealth or income but is only interested in differences in race or gender despises the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and Lincoln Memorial as shameful tributes to the dead white men who either owned enslaved Africans or would have preferred to send them back to Africa in order to free them.  ,  ,
During Trump’s first term as president, there was little progress in draining the swamp. Trump’s continued growth and the federal budget deficit increased in large part as a result of his lack of effective control of the Republican Party, which he was only starting to turn 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.
Moving 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, to prevent them from being politically or culturally dominant anywhere, is one way to drain the swamp, which is increasingly preferred by Trump supporters. Those who support this argue that it should be used as a supplement to ceasing to hire bureaucrats, making them easier to fire, or cutting their budgets, and not as a substitute for those actions.  ,  ,  ,
Trump can best express in his nomination-related acceptance speech that he will take the oath of office somewhere far away from the District of Columbia. Why should anyone believe that Trump will fight hard in matters of substance if he ca n’t come up with the will to take the oath of office somewhere else? It would be largely symbolic, but it would be costless.
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 ideal second Trump inauguration
How could Trump promise to create his inauguration in a way that will increase the support of his base and persuade the electorate’s many who are never-elected to support him as a 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 do n’t bother to cast ballots because they know he’ll win their states by a landslide will have a reason to support him, namely, to have his inauguration held in their home state. That would tend to increase Trump’s popular vote total.
Trump also could and arguably should promise publicly:
- to pardon all of the January 6 prisoners “on day one” of his second term,
- to bring 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 visit Washington while President.  ,
That parade on day three would be, quite literally, the Washington inaugural parade to end all Washington inaugural parades.
No longer does America require political capital physically.
About 300,000 people attended Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.  , That was a small crowd relative to those that had attended recent previous inaugurations. Trump overstated the size of the crowd when asked about its size, and he continued to do so even when there was conflicting 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 could and ought to have questioned why a town that was so different from the rest of the country should continue to serve as the nation’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 does n’t.  ,
No longer does America require political capital physically.. 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.
The best way to create a liquid market for financial securities was a century ago, when you could build the biggest room possible, cram it as many young men as you could, and connect those young men to the outside world via telegraph and phone.  , 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 is closing, and why seats on the New York Stock Exchange used to be for a fraction of what they were forty years ago.
The majority of government tasks, including nearly all of those involving government management, are based on information exchanges, which are no less convenient than making bids 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 accomplish that by never visiting Washington during his second term in office. If Trump finds that too outrageous, he could at least hold his inaugural address 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.