New York Times looks at history of Inauguration Day

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January 20, 2021

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. It’s Donald Trump’s final day as president — and Joe Biden’s first.

Franklin D. Roosevelt at his final inauguration in 1945.George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

A capital under siege

A presidential inauguration in the United States is usually a celebration of democracy.

Hundreds of thousands of people descend on Washington to watch a newly elected president take the oath of office. A departing president signals his respect for the country by celebrating the new one, even when that departing president is disappointed by the election’s outcome — as was the case with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and others.

“I grew up in the Washington area, and inaugurations have always been a time of hope and fresh beginnings regardless of party,” Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, told me.

But when American democracy is under siege, an inauguration can have a very different feel. That was true in 1945, when the U.S. was fighting fascism in World War II, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration was a spartan affair. It was true in 1861, when the country was on the verge of war and Abraham Lincoln was the target of an assassination plot. It was true again four years later, when smallpox was raging and the Civil War was nearing its end.

And it will be true today — when mismanagement has left the U.S. coping with the world’s worst Covid-19 toll and when law enforcement agencies are warning of potential violence by President Trump’s supporters.

The day will still be a triumph of democracy in the most important way: A defeated president’s attempt to overturn a fair election has failed, as has a violent attack on Congress by his supporters. The election’s winner, Joe Biden, will be sworn in as president around noon Eastern, just after the new vice president, Kamala Harris.

Nonetheless, American democracy is under siege. Washington resembles an armed encampment, with visitors barred from many places, fences surrounding the National Mall and troops lining the streets. Trump will not attend the event, and many of his supporters believe his false claims.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Peter, who has covered every White House since Clinton’s and who first covered an inauguration as a junior reporter in 1985, the start of Ronald Reagan’s second term. “It’s surreal to see our city become such an armed camp. It reminds me of Baghdad or Kabul back when I covered those wars, but I never imagined we would see it quite this way in Washington.”

Here’s how to watch today’s inauguration. Coverage will begin around 10 a.m. Eastern.

Below, we briefly look back at the three inaugurations most similar to today’s — from 1945, 1865 and 1861.

Abraham Lincoln stood under a wood canopy for his first inauguration.Library of Congress

1861

Several Southern states seceded after Abraham Lincoln’s election, and one newspaper described fears that “armed bands” would try to thwart his inauguration. A plot to kill Lincoln forced him to sneak into Washington in the early morning.

On Inauguration Day, cavalry members flanked Lincoln’s procession, soldiers blocked streets and roof-mounted snipers eyed the crowd. The first sentence on the front page of the next day’s New York Times: “The day to which all have looked with so much anxiety and interest has come and passed. ABRAHAM LINCOLN has been inaugurated, and ‘all’s well.’”

Black soldiers were among the crowd at Lincoln’s second inauguration.Alexander Gardner, via Library of Congress

1865

Washington was a grim wartime city for Lincoln’s second inauguration, having endured waves of smallpox and torrential recent rains. The crowd that day stood in mud “almost knee deep.” Lincoln rode in an open carriage, with a military escort of both Black and white troops.

A Times account — by the poet Walt Whitman — noted that as the president spoke, “a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appeared like a hovering bird, right over him.”

The actor John Wilkes Booth, soon to become Lincoln’s assassin, was in the crowd that day.

A small crowd at the White House for F.D.R.’s fourth inauguration.Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress

1945

Security concerns and wartime austerity turned Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration into “the simplest inauguration on record” with “the smallest ever” crowd, The Times wrote.

The public portions of the event lasted just 15 minutes, partly because Roosevelt was ailing. He trembled as he stood on the South Portico of the White House to deliver a brief address. Less than three months later, he would die of a cerebral hemorrhage. By the end of that summer, the U.S. had won the wars in both Europe and Asia.

THE LATEST NEWS

TRUMP’S LAST DAY

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, blamed Trump for the Capitol riot, saying the mob had been “provoked by the president and other powerful people.” In his final hours in office, Trump granted 143 pardons and commutations, including Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, one of his top fund-raisers in 2016. You can find more notable pardons here. In his four years in office, Trump used Twitter to praise, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and to amplify his scorn. Here are all of his insults. Americans are looking back: “In the last four years, has there been a day when Trump wasn’t somewhere in your orbit?” (This six-minute video revisits memorable moments from his presidency.)

BIDEN’S FIRST DAY

The Senate began confirmation hearings for five of Biden’s cabinet nominees. But delays mean he will probably become the first president in decades to take office without his national security team in place. Kamala Harris will swear in three new Democratic senators — Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Alex Padilla of California — after she becomes vice president, giving Democrats narrow control of the Senate. Biden will propose an immigration bill today that would give undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship and let “Dreamers” apply for permanent residency. The National Guard removed two troops from inauguration service because of possible links to right-wing extremist movements. These photos show Biden’s long road to the presidency. Can Biden take his Peloton with him to the White House? Yes, cybersecurity experts say, but the bike may need some adjustments.

  At present we look forward to the future and a Unified America

actually, the only thing I think is interesting is that socialist democrats will go down for two FAILED attempts at impeaching Trump in one he was acquitted the other he couldn't be brought to trial because their evidence was hearsay. Also a little oversite

It appears that even if the House of Representatives impeaches President Trump this week, the Senate trial on that impeachment will not begin until after Trump has left office and President-Elect Biden has become president on Jan. 20. That Senate trial would be unconstitutional.

On Sunday, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) said that, while House Democrats would take up articles of impeachment this week against President Trump, the House might delay sending to the Senate any articles passed by the House until after President-elect Biden’s first 100 days in office. Biden proposed an alternative, under which the new Senate would immediately begin working on his legislative agenda and confirming his Cabinet appointments in the mornings and conduct the impeachment trial in the afternoon.

The sequencing of the House impeachment proceedings before Trump’s departure from office and the inauguration of the new president, followed by a Senate impeachment trial, perhaps months later, raises the question of whether a former president can be impeached after he leaves office.

The Constitution itself answers this question clearly: No, he cannot be. Once Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20, Congress loses its constitutional authority to continue impeachment proceedings against him — even if the House has already approved articles of impeachment.

Therefore, if the House of Representatives were to impeach the president before he leaves office, the Senate could not thereafter convict the former president and disqualify him under the Constitution from future public office.

The reason for this is found in the Constitution itself. Trump would no longer be incumbent in the Office of the President at the time of the delayed Senate proceeding and would no longer be subject to “impeachment conviction” by the Senate, under the Constitution’s Impeachment Clauses. Which is to say that the Senate’s only power under the Constitution is to convict — or not — an incumbent president.

The purpose, text and structure of the Constitution’s Impeachment Clauses confirm this intuitive and common-sense understanding.

The very concept of constitutional impeachment presupposes the impeachment, conviction and removal of a president who is, at the time of his impeachment, an incumbent in the office from which he is removed. Indeed, that was the purpose of the impeachment power, to remove from office a president or other “civil official” before he could further harm the nation from the office he then occupies.

The plain text of the Constitution’s several Impeachment Clauses confirms this understanding of this limit on Congress’ impeachment power. For example, Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution reads, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In the same constitutional vein, Article I, Section 3 provides in relevant part: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

It has been suggested that the Senate could proceed to try the former president and convict him in an effort to disqualify him from holding public office in the future. This is incorrect because it is a constitutional impeachment of a president that authorizes his constitutional disqualification. If a president has not been constitutionally impeached, then the Senate is without the constitutional power to disqualify him from future office.

Some constitutional scholars take support for their view that Congress can impeach a former president from two instances in which early Congresses impeached “civil officials” after they had resigned their public offices — the impeachments of Sen. William Blount in 1797 and the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876.

These congressional impeachment cases provide some backing for the argument that Congress can conclude that it has the power under the Constitution to impeach a former president. And Congress’s understanding of its constitutional powers would be a weighty consideration in the ultimate determination of whether the Congress does possess such authority. When and if the former president goes to court to challenge his impeachment trial as unconstitutional, Congress is sure to make its argument based on these congressional precedents, as well as others, a case that would almost certainly make its way to the Supreme Court.

In the end, though, only the Supreme Court can answer the question of whether Congress can impeach a president who has left office prior to its attempted impeachment of him. It is highly unlikely the Supreme Court would yield to Congress’s view that it has the power to impeach a president who is no longer in office when the Constitution itself is so clear that it does not.

So Trump walks twice and no impeachment without trial so the Socialist Democrats failed in their Marxist attempts to put the stink on Trump and use the media to cover the Vice president's complicity with the groups that infiltrated the trump supporters they are members of resist BLM and other groups each of the people arrested are being defended by a defense fund she set up.