You Are Invited to the Predators' Ball, as Food

The weather was bad — grey, damp, hovering right on the edge of freezing, so that the rain fluctuated between icy pellets and a soaking, all-enveloping mist. Washington, D.C. street vendors, the most politically agnostic demographic in America, harangued the dripping passersby to visit their folding tables heaped with wet hoodies and bright red ​“FINISH THE WALL” beanies and knockoff golden Trump high tops fresh out of the knockoff box. (Many of these same vendors had been hawking left-wing swag at the anti-Trump People’s March two days before.) A couple of hours before the rally, the huddled masses, trudging slowly behind high metal barriers, had shown up.

The line began just outside the arena at 7^th and H street. It stretched all the way down to 6^th, then to 5^th, then 4^th, then 3^rd. There it bent south down to F street, then back to 4^th, then south two more blocks to D street, then back to 3^rd again. Passing under a highway overpass, it continued down to C street, then to Constitution, and then all the way down to Independence, which marks the southern border of the National Mall. It swung right there, past the National Museum of the American Indian, and finally found its end just in front of the Air and Space Museum. It took me 40 minutes walking at New York City speed to reach its terminus. The rally would begin in an hour, and still people were coming. I asked a young man at the end of the line what he thought his chances of getting in were.

“About 50/50,” he shrugged. The correct answer was 0%.

For many of the people there, just standing in the frozen rain a mile or so from where Their President would be speaking at a place they would not get into was seemingly enough. They were satisfied just being there to suffer. I went down the line, asking each group why they were, against all rationality, out there. ​“He gave up a lot for us, so I think it’s only fair for us to stand in line to see him,” said a young man from New Jersey.

“This is all about the anticipation of what we think is gonna happen,” said an older man from Maryland. ​“Changes in education, changes in cost, changes in our economy,” added a man standing next to him. ​“It’s kind of a once in a lifetime thing,” the man’s wife chimed in. ​“I went to Ronald Reagan’s [inauguration] back in the 80s, and this has been the first time I’ve even been motivated to pay attention to politics since then.”

A family from Long Island said they were looking forward to ​“getting our country back,” ​“having a budget,” and ​“bringing the people back together.” A Spanish-speaking family from Virginia, two parents who shyly pulled their daughter over to translate, said they were excited for ​“more security,” a better economy, and a tighter immigration system. ​“There are good immigrants and bad immigrants,” the daughter explained. ​“If someone has a criminal record and they’re allowed to stay here — even myself, I’m not sure if I’m gonna be safe.”

“Closing the border, you know, Laken Riley,” said a man from Boston. ​“Normality.”

The normality they craved was somewhere close, just past the metal barriers and Secret Service agents in kevlar vests, deep inside the mind of a man they admired for murky reasons. I trudged back out the way I came. In the distance, shrouded in ominous grey mist, the spire of the Washington Monument loomed over the wet but docile assembly, its red airplane warning light blinking steadily. A preacher prowled the street next to the crowd, holding a tall metal pole with signs proclaiming Jesus’s supremacy. He quoted Scripture as he paced.

“PRIDE!” he hollered. ​“PRIDE goeth before the fall!”

Inauguration Day itself, sunny and cold, only served to sharpen the implicit question for all of the Trump fans in town: How do you like this, motherfuckers? In the absence of any designated place for regular people to go (except back into Capital One Arena, for a viewing party, for those who wanted to wake up at 3 a.m. to sit in line, once again), the entire city was gripped with an overwhelming sense of absurdity. All of the security theater of an inauguration was in place — the miles of fencing, the gerrymander-shaped security perimeter, the Humvees parked in downtown intersections, the snipers silhouetted on rooftops — but there were almost no humans in the place where inaugurations usually happen. Machine gun-toting security forces were reduced to being doormen, politely pulling open gates for the handful of people who wandered by.

Rather than being a grand tableaux of the MAGA faithful, the Mall was a tundra of frozen mud. Someone had built a waist-high replica of the Capitol and Washington Monument out of snow on the empty grass. The metal crowd control barriers which had been set up the week before were already stacked up on wooden pallets, robbed of their crowd. The people wandering the strangely empty space seemed miffed. ​“Why they took the screens down, I don’t know,” one man grumbled to his wife. A minute later, an uncertain-looking man wandered by narrating the scene to someone on a speaker phone: ​“I, uh, I don’t see any screens out here…”

The few who had come out that morning were easy prey for the roving photographers and the desperate reporters who made up a large chunk of the Mall’s population as the swearing-in ceremony approached. The media-savvy lunatics — the Shouting Religious Guy, the Liberal Who Is There to Argue, the Guy Who Dresses as Spider Man for Some Reason — were able to bask in the attention. The unfortunate middle Americans who arrived full of sincerity, though, were in grave danger of being turned into nationally famous chumps. Jordan Klepper, the tall Daily Show correspondent whose career consists of mocking these very people on television, stood in the middle of the Mall with a camera crew, politely luring in unsuspecting passersby. ​“How are you folks doing? Where’d you come in from?” he would smile, like an anglerfish tempting its prey.

Indeed, everyone there was engaged in asking some version of the question: ​“What are you idiots doing here?” It was impossible not to wonder. Is the joke on us? Or you? Or all of us at once? From the arctic dirt of the Mall you could look up to the bright, shiny, flag-draped Capitol building, where Trump was being sworn in among a tight crowd of billionaires, ultra wealthy donors and fellow politicians. His presidency promises massive tax breaks to these corporate tycoons; the removal of regulations on Big Tech, crypto, and AI companies; the elimination of labor and environmental protections; and trade wars that could spike the very price increases Trump railed against during his campaign. No matter. 

Hundreds of thousands of his most loyal voters had come to this place at their own expense to applaud him as their hero. They were, all too literally, left out in the cold. He had used them all as a footstool to step back into the White House, where he could safely forget about them. Their fanatical devotion to this man — who didn’t even care enough about them to be chilly for an hour, but was happy to sentence them to stand in miserable, endless lines in the very same cold in order to secure the privilege of cheering him on — was as sad as it was revolting.

On inauguration morning, one man with calloused hands and a flannel work shirt and a red MAGA hat stood off to the side of the Mall, by the empty benches. His son, who looked about five years old, was gleefully running and sliding across a patch of ice over and over again. The boy was wearing a Trump beanie. The man was watching his son with tremendous tenderness in his eyes. It was a scene of profound human love, placed in the setting of the dawn of an age of fascism and brutality that will create immense suffering. To understand the pit that America has dug for itself, you must be able to reconcile these things without spiraling into insanity.

Most of the regular people did not get to go to the inauguration ceremony, or the rally that followed, or the ensuing invitation-only celebrations. By Monday evening, work crews were out disassembling the barriers around the Capitol One Arena. Vendors were cutting prices on their wall-sized ​“Daddy’s Home!” banners. The figures bundled in sleeping bags in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library were once again homeless people, rather than visitors camped out in a line to see the new president. 

As if to emphasize the infinite levels of loathsomeness, the weary attendees in red baseball caps and Trump hoodies who were heading home from a long day of worship were being passed in the opposite direction by pink-cheeked men in tuxedos and tall women in ball gowns who were headed to the black tie ball at the Grand Hyatt. Washington was shrugging off the momentary interruption and continuing in its natural state. There was nobody in town except for suckers, and those who knew how to make money off of them. Only the suckers didn’t know which group they were in.