Four years ago, these four people were among the thousands who were in Washington the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president. We asked how they plan to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden.
But later in the day, that upbeat energy dissipated as he and a friend watched the new president deliver a speech about “American carnage.” George-Warren and his friend drank champagne, or “cham-pain,” as he called it, fearing what the next four years would bring.
As George-Warren prepared to watch another inauguration this week, the 29-year-old thought about all that his community had lost amid a deadly pandemic and the Trump administration. A citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation, he remembered the many tribal members and leaders who had died from complications with covid-19. He thought about the elders who had wept as the Trump administration dramatically shrunk the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah and worked to expand energy extraction in sacred land. He felt exhausted by all of it.
But now, he said, “it feels like a dark shadow is slowing moving away.” He saw reasons to be hopeful: A president willing to address climate change. A Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, who will be the first Native American to serve in a Cabinet position.
“I feel like there’s so much possibility here,” George-Warren said.
He planned to live-stream the Inauguration events with the same friend as the 2017 Inauguration, once again drinking champagne — this time, the celebratory kind. And he didn’t even mind the scaled-back plans for the day.
“I just want someone who is an administrator, who is doing their job,” George-Warren said. He looked forward to no longer feeling constantly worried about the next unhinged thing the president might tweet or say or do. “I want it to be boring,” he said.
— Samantha Schmidt
A four-year ‘nightmare’
At Trump’s 2017 Inauguration, Heribert von Feilitzsch and a friend descended on Pennsylvania Avenue carrying signs protesting against Trump that read “No country for small hands” and “This hat don’t fit” — a reference to Feilitzsch’s opinion that Trump’s MAGA caps looked ill-fitting on him.
The 55-year-old Rappahannock County resident says he now wished he could attend the Biden Inauguration to show support. But instead, he, like millions of people, will be watching the ceremony on TV.
“I think the Trump presidency will go down in history, at least American history, as the worst president ever to occupy the White House,” Feilitzsch said.
Feilitzsch grew up in Bavaria. His grandfather, Udo Bintz, was a journalist during World War II who was arrested and sentenced to a Nazi prison and was sent to various concentration camps. Feilitzsch said he believed his grandfather would have found the past four years in the U.S. “absolutely astonishing” and “very similar” to Hitler’s Germany during that period.
“You had the establishment of some sort of concentration camps for refugees coming into the country in the Southwest, where kids were held in cages. It’s unfathomable that this could happen in this country,” he said.
Feilitzsch owns a company that imports German-made, custom doors. He said he had planned to open a U.S. factory to localize the manufacturing, but his investors backed out of the deal due to concerns over higher import taxes proposed by Trump.
“The business environment that relied on foreign trade was severely affected,” he said. Feilitzsch also called Trump’s pandemic response a “disaster” and was dumbfounded that millions voted to reelect him.
“After watching this nightmare unfold for four years,” he said, “it’s beyond me that they would vote for him again.”
— Keith L. Alexander
Yearning for ‘normalcy’
Four years ago, Saud Iqbal of Chantilly, Va., stood on a street corner near the Washington Monument, offering hugs and asking people passing by, “Meet a Muslim. Ask me anything!”
He had attended the 2017 presidential inauguration in the hopes that if Trump’s supporters met and spoke with a Muslim like him, they would better understand his community. The 35-year-old security analyst is involved with the youth group of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a revival movement within Islam that preaches about the importance of tolerance.
He was surprised at the many people who came up to him that day expressing their support. He had hoped it would be a sign that, after a divisive campaign, the president would be able to unify the country. But instead, he saw Trump’s travel ban separate people in his community from their spouses oversees. He witnessed how Trump’s rhetoric divided people further.
“It culminated in the type of civil unrest we saw two weeks ago,” Iqbal said.
Iqbal had initially hoped to attend the Inauguration again in person. But after the riot at the U.S. Capitol, he planned to watch it on TV at home, with his wife and three boys, ages 7, 4 and 1. He had tried explaining what happened that day to his older sons. The president’s supporters were upset that he lost the election, the father told them, and those people rushed into the Capitol to express that anger. It was the first time his son had heard of the U.S. Capitol.
Iqbal hated that these were his son’s first lessons about the different branches of government. “I want to teach them about it when it’s normal,” he said, “and not when it’s under attack.”
That’s what the father looked forward to most: “To having a normal day when we don’t have big breaking news or a big controversy or scandal. Some sort of normalcy.”
— Samantha Schmidt
A sense of loss — and of hope
Mary Shaw loves presidential inaugurations — the excitement of the January day, the celebration of democracy with other Americans.
Shaw, 71, has turned out for the swearing-in of a string of presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She says she is inspired by the peaceful transfer of power, regardless of whether her candidate won the election.
“I did not vote for Trump,” she said. “But it was history, and I wanted to see history being made.”
But this year, she will watch it unfold on a large flat-screen television in the living room of her small rambler in Lanham, Md.
She wishes it could be otherwise.
“I feel robbed of this moment in history,” she said.
She now holds Trump responsible for the mayhem at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the massive security operation that has overtaken Washington, with blocked streets and military troops and check points.
“Each time I see it, it gives me a fear of how do you get the respect back?” she said. “What’s coming next?”
In the months ahead, she hopes Biden will restore balance and calm. She also hopes he will do more for the environment and lead the way on tax changes that favor working people, not the rich.
Until then, she will spend Wednesday morning transfixed on ceremonies for the country’s 46th president — and for Kamala D. Harris, the first woman of color to be elected vice president.
“That’s incredible,” she said about Harris.
And she will be taking it all in from her La-Z-Boy recliner, waving an American flag in tribute.
— Donna St. George
