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Strange Rumblings in Columbia: Inauguration Day Weirdness
Some odd news and sights coming out of Washington in the last few days. First, the public Inauguration Day ceremony on the National Mall was cancelled. Ostensibly due to poor weather (the forecasted high temperature for Inauguration Day is 28F/-2C), although other Presidents have had public ceremonies in cooler temperatures. President Trump would be sworn in the Congressional chamber of the Capitol building in front of the full Congress, similar to a state of the Union address.
Then a day or two ago ago, that plan was cancelled, and the ceremony is being moved to the White House. It will be much smaller and most of Congress will not be there.
When Trump arrived in Virginia yesterday, all the cars in the motorcade had an odd feature. A three foot tall pole-like device attached to the roof, around 4 inches wide. It is apparently some kind of anti-drone countermeasure. There are rumors spreading that the first two ceremony types were canceled due to intelligence reports of a credible threat of drone attack.
Adding to the already odd protocol, it appears that Vice-President elect JD Vance will not even be present in Washington DC for the inauguration and will be sworn in at an undisclosed location somewhere else. This harks back to the years after 9/11 when Vice President Cheney would spend State of the Union addresses in an undisclosed bunker in case of a massive attack.
Meanwhile, there are still several thousand troops in Washington DC, who were brought in to safeguard the election certification process.
This all seems very odd. If this is in response to a foreign threat of some kind it seems like a very credible and serious one indeed. It is also of course sending bolts of static electricity through the creases of my tinfoil hat, but I have no idea how to interpret them. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.
Lots of people have reasons to kill DJT and a damn good amount of them are state actors or equivalent with the means to pull off sophisticated assassinations.
Ukraine, Iran, radical left groups, parts of USG afraid of retaliation, now even hardcore Zionists.
And that's the obvious ones, let's not count the parties that would lose from his economic policy enough to consider direct action. Or those accelerationists that know the chaos that the world would be plunged into if he was gunned down now.
I'm sure the Secret Service is tied into knots right now. But what this atmosphere of siege will mean politically, if anything, I don't know. Lots of people want to kill even a normal POTUS.
I'm willing to predict "not much". Maybe public events will be smaller or more selective, but that doesn't matter much until 2026 anyway.
A pity that we're not making this public event "smaller" and "more selective" on the grounds that when your country is 36 trillion dollars in the hole, it's frankly obscene to be spending anything on a glorified public party. All that's needed for the inauguration is the President, the VP, and the Chief Justice to administer the oath, and maybe a BBC camera crew to show the rest of the world that the inauguration actually happened, plus the usual Secret Service security that'd be there anyway. Anything beyond that is frivolity.
How much of the budget is being footed by the taxpayer? Corporations, as we know, have pitched in millions for this particular party.
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