Donald Trump Returns to Washington

The Potomac River in Washington is frozen. On Friday afternoon, divers on a D.C. police boat maneuvered through slabs of ice atop the water and recovered the second of two dead bodies—a pickup truck had careened off the Memorial Bridge and been entombed under the surface. “There is an Arctic blast sweeping the Country,” President-elect Donald Trump posted online, from Palm Beach. The bridge connects Arlington National Cemetery to the National Mall, which was ringed by thousands of tons of steel security barriers ahead of Trump’s Inauguration. D.C. was in the middle of a set change; preparations had been under way for weeks. When I went downtown to pick up credentials for the inaugural parade, the Lime scooter I was riding stopped itself automatically at K Street, as though a dog had run against the perimeter of an electric fence. As it turned out, there would be no real parade; because of the windchill, it had been moved indoors, to the Capital One Arena, in Chinatown. The Inauguration itself was relocated, too, to the Capitol Rotunda, where only a select few will be able to watch live.

“January 20th cannot come fast enough!” Trump wrote, in his post. “Everybody, even those that initially opposed a Victory by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Administration, just want it to happen.” Trump would arrive in a city far more hospitable than the Washington of 2017. This time, he had no trouble booking marquee performers, as mainstream as Nelly and Carrie Underwood, who sings the theme song for Sunday Night Football. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg would sit on the dais as Trump got sworn in; Musk was reportedly planning to turn a small boutique hotel near Ivanka Trump’s house into a private club, his own mini Mar-a-Lago. The protests awaiting Trump were marginal compared with the height-of-the-resistance Women’s March. (“From the North Lawn, you can hear the faint cries and chants,” a White House pool report mentioned in passing.) A New York Times poll published over the weekend found that the American public was largely sympathetic to significant parts of Trump’s planned policy agenda, even if they didn’t like him personally.

A partner at a law firm who is joining the Administration had spent the weekend attending various celebratory galas. “It’s kind of like when you were really into a band and only like fifteen people would show up at their gigs, at a time when being known as a fan of that band could cause you to lose your job or be thrown into prison,” she said. “And now that band is playing huge sold-out concerts, and everybody says that they love them and have always loved them.” The Make America Healthy Again Ball, set for Monday evening and with a no-seed-oil menu, was one of the most sought-after invitations.

Trump has spent the past two months happily sequestered at Mar-a-Lago, golfing and dining outside with world leaders and tech C.E.O.s. He was named Time’s Person of the Year and rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Since Trump’s election victory in November, everyone had been saying that this was the “greatest political comeback in history”—but now he has to come back to Washington to actually govern. Last January, on his way to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was delayed by snowstorms. He had worried that historically low temperatures would keep some of his most loyal supporters home, denying him a crucial victory as campaign season began in earnest. Back then, the weather was an easy way to contrive narrative tension for a story whose ending felt too obvious. Now Trump was putting on a good face about cold weather derailing the Inauguration—“Everyone will be happy,” he wrote—but the last-minute scramble was a reminder that the end of the honeymoon was fast approaching.

On Thursday, on the second floor of a bar in Capitol Hill, Steve Bannon was being introduced as a host of the “War Room” podcast party, which was called “A New Order of the Ages.” The m.c. alluded to a brewing tension between the MAGA old guard and Trump’s coterie of Silicon Valley supporters, while calling Bannon to the mike: “Despite billionaires and tech feudalists, he has carried the movement on his shoulders.” Many of the weekend’s events were hosted by these so-called tech feudalists, or even just by corporations like Spotify. (A guest at Peter Thiel’s party, on Saturday, texted me that you could tell who the tech donors were because they wore tuxedos, signalling that they’d be heading off to balls afterward.) Bannon told the group, “This is kicking off one of the greatest weekends in American history.” He said that the gathering was meant to “kind of replicate what Andrew Jackson did—a real populist throwdown party, people having a good time, people drinking heavily.” Guests were drinking cocktails called American Carnage; waiters passed around oysters and salmon tartare. “Our leader Donald Trump, at high noon on Monday, takes the oath,” Bannon said. “Then the real fun begins. . . . You have two, three days to get sober.”

By the bar, I talked to someone who had been nominated for a role in the Trump’s Administration State Department. “We realized the entire regime could be completely tuned out,” he said. “Part of why Democrats are so subdued is because, if it was just white people giving Trump the win, that wouldn’t really count. But it was a multiethnic, totally positive patriotic coalition that delivered the victory.” “Believe,” by Cher, was playing on the speakers. He went on, “We totally seized the vital center, issue-wise,” adding that now “the needle you have to thread is the tech right versus the white-working-class base that feels a sense of aggrievedness to this new multiracial coalition.” A man named Vadim, who works in tech and who had helped Trump as a grassroots activist in northern Virginia, said, “The media is trying to drive a wedge between Elon and Trump. If each of their egos doesn’t get in the way, that’ll be a formidable alliance.” He continued, “The MAGA movement is not a monolith.” He didn’t think this was a bad thing. “But governing is messy,” he said. “And we have a slim majority in the House.”

Matthew Goodwin, a British political scientist, told me that he commended Bannon for delivering “a blueprint for how to reshape conservatism to national conservatism, not liberal conservatism. And now that’s global.” If Trump hadn’t won, he said, “had it gone any other way, Western civilization—the values of the West—would be over. Now that’s how we’re selling the next U.K. election. This is your last chance.” Post-Brexit British politics—the chaos and then collapse of the Conservative leadership—offered an object lesson. “The one thing that can fuck all of this up is internal division,” he noted. “British Conservatives came in with a massive mandate. They didn’t know what to give the country.”

In the middle of the crowded room, I found Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer who had helped plan 2017’s DeploraBall, an alternative to the main balls that was designed for the weird online fringe that “memed Donald Trump into the White House,” as they put it. Posobiec told me, “Last time we were burglars, breaking and entering. Now we own the building.” They would have to figure out how to live in it. The incoming State nominee said, “A lot of people in the online right are temperamentally oppositional. They can’t work in institutions. There are a lot of bitter, mostly young white men who have been totally screwed by the system.” Posobiec acknowledged that “it’s always more fun to be a challenger. Now you have to do the job. That’s a hundred times harder.” He described a natural alliance between the Make America Healthy Again, crypto, and MAGA factions—a counter-élite going after the original élite. “There’s still Davos, Brussels, the Pentagon,” he said. “It kinda feels like we’re in a place where the Tea Party was—you have to win, but then you have to win results. They don’t understand how this town is going to try to get rid of them. The power structure is going to respond.”

A crowd around Bannon was dancing to “Big Pimpin’ ” by Jay-Z. People congratulated one another on new jobs. “I was so glad when I saw the announcement,” one guy in a Trump-Vance zip-up said to another. Trump’s second term was often discussed as if it were a totally new chapter, a frame that neatly ignored the failures of the original go-around. The exuberance had a way of papering over the challenges to come. As Posobiec put it, “Victory is not getting elected or getting inaugurated. You can’t define victory until the last day of Trump’s term.” A Bitcoin venture philanthropist in a cowboy hat told me, “What has gotten us here will not keep us going.”

The following morning, two floors underground at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, members of the Republican National Committee streamed into a ballroom for their winter meeting. At the last R.N.C. meeting I’d attended, in the spring, there was debate about whether or not to redirect funding for down-ballot races to pay Trump’s hefty legal fees; now members were mostly swapping inaugural-ball plans as they snacked on lemon bars. I entered the meeting during the opening benediction: “We pray for all the members of Congress and all elected officials in our great country, that they act in your righteous name.” Lara Trump, the R.N.C. co-chair, addressed the members. “Look at the way we have expanded this tent,” she said. “But we have to make good on that. . . . They’re saying, ‘You have my vote now, but can you keep it?’ ”

Michael Whatley, the chairman, reiterated the point. “As we look ahead to a new chapter in American history, we have to ask ourselves one simple question. Do we want two years of making America great again, or do we want four?” he said. “On Monday, when President Trump and J. D. Vance roll up their sleeves, they will do so with a Republican Senate and a Republican House. Within days, they will kick off a new golden era of American government.” But a possible end to this golden era was already coming into view. “Before you know it, the 2026 midterms will be here,” he said. “They’re coming sooner than you think. If we let Democrats seize back control, everything changes.” Even before 2026, Republicans on Capitol Hill can afford little internal disagreement; in the past few weeks, Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, has barely avoided a government shutdown and almost lost the House Speakership. At one point during the meeting, a Committee member named Morton Blackwell stood up. “In 1964, I happened to be the youngest elected delegate for Barry Goldwater at the San Francisco Convention,” he said. “In those days, most conservatives believed that to be right in the sense of being correct is sufficient to win.” He went on, “There are some of you who won’t remember the main slogan of the Goldwater campaign was ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ That is not a winning campaign slogan. . . . Just being right does not mean you can win.”

Around 4:30 P.M. on Saturday, Trump’s motorcade arrived on the tarmac at Palm Beach International Airport so he could board a government plane that would bring him back to Washington. When he landed at Dulles, reporters shouted questions about how he felt about his Inauguration ceremony being moved indoors. He pumped his fist and stayed quiet. Hundreds of supporters were staked out in the snow as the motorcade approached Trump’s golf course in Virginia, which would be hosting a welcome party; they chanted “U.S.A.” and the clubhouse was lit up in red, white, and blue. An Elvis impersonator performed. Trump and Melania watched a display of golden fireworks while “Nessun Dorma” played. Charlie Kirk posted a clip of himself giving a thumbs-up, captioned, “America’s Golden Era is about to begin.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters, who had travelled to Washington from all over the country, would be left to watch the Inauguration on TV screens. And what was described by Trump as a weather-related event had already sent some into a tailspin about the peaceful transfer of power and the security state. General Michael Flynn tweeted, “The walk away point of it all is that the outgoing administration cannot or will not secure the inauguration sufficiently for the United States of America to hold a peaceful transfer of power. ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.” (A few hours later, he added, “In the you can’t make this up category—with all the craziness going on, today is NATIONAL POPCORN DAY! ENJOY!!!”) There was speculation that even the small indoor ceremony at the Capitol would be scrapped at the last minute for something private at the White House.

“There’s been an undercurrent of questioning of, Is there something bigger going on that we aren’t being told?” Tiffany Marie Brannon, a conservative strategist and podcaster, told me. “There have been two very well-known assassination events, so there’s also that kind of thought going around in the ether. It feels opaque.” The grassroots, she went on, “those travelling long distances who maybe don’t have a lot of money, who couldn’t afford the ball tickets,” some of which cost tens of thousands of dollars, “aren’t as aware of the conversations going on about potential threats. . . . There is kind of a separation. It’s kind of like, Now what do I do? I’m just going to be in D.C. in the cold and I could have watched this on TV?” In any case, she continued, “it’s about coming together as brothers and sisters in arms for conservatism, even eating chicken tenders and espresso Martinis at 3 A.M. at the Waldorf with Kimberly Guilfoyle.”

On Sunday, when President Joe Biden departed from Joint Base Andrews for his final official trip, a plane that said “Argentina” on its side was on the tarmac. Biden was going; the Argentinean President, Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” and MAGA admirer, was arriving as Trump’s guest. At the Capital One Arena, supporters had been lining up since dawn for a final victory rally. They were blocks from Trump’s last major speech in D.C.—the one he gave at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021. “I’m the President, bitch” was a new shirt for sale; otherwise, it was just like the long line at every other Trump rally. A life-size cutout of Trump bodysurfed on top of the crowd. Many of the same people would be back the next day; the arena was hosting an Inauguration live stream.

Trump’s rally remarks were a variation on the usual stump speech from his campaign. The crowd was as enraptured as ever. Several hours later, at a candlelight dinner for donors, he referred to his victory as a “once in a lifetime realignment.” Across town, Bannon, delivering the keynote at an Inaugural ball, told dinner guests, “They’re about to come in there and rip his face off. They’re not gonna toss you the keys.” Still, there was a final moment of honeymoon to be had. Even while he was President, Trump kept flying around the country to hold rallies; in some ways, he preferred them to the official events in Washington. On Monday, he will get the Inauguration that is perhaps most fitting: he’ll go from the Capitol Rotunda back to the Capital One Arena, where he’ll hold another rally. ♦