Yes, I did go to Trump's Inauguration

With a little gentle nudging, of course

Imagine you are standing on a sidewalk on a cold January morning and a woman walks by and shouts loud accusations of white supremacy in your face. This experience is exactly what happened to me on January 19, 2025, in our nation’s grand and Romanesque capital of Washington DC. Since I do not believe in the philosophy of the Ku Klux Klan, I just laughed off the experience as one with a woman clearly imprisoned in her political echo chamber. For weeks before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I had been resisting my mother’s not-so-subtle pleas that I should join her. Simply, I was wary of leaving my comfortable life here in Tennessee and diving directly into the global epicenter that was Washington on inauguration weekend. But my mother, being the caring, selfless, politically active, and most of all, persistent person she is, did not give up her efforts to secure space for me at several inaugural events. And lo and behold, a guest at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel cancelled their reservation. And off I flew to Washington.

On that Sunday of my unusual encounter, temperatures in Washington had plunged and by Monday would plunge even lower. Still, I was not deterred from venturing outdoors, even if it meant walking entirely across town. You see, the main argument that swayed me in favor embarking on this frozen journey to Washington was an opportunity to meet a fellow whom I will call Jane Doe at the Heritage Foundation who happened to once work at the American Embassy in Warsaw. For anyone who knows me well, and let’s face it, most of you do, you should not be surprised how a job at that embassy is a position I wholeheartedly desire. After an ill-advised, hour-long, and ultimately aborted attempt to grab an Uber on Washington’s busiest weekend in 8 years, the desire for me to meet with Ms. Doe forced the group into a more drastic decision.

Even though there are no golf courses in the vicinity of downtown Washington, the Willard Intercontinental happens to own a fleet of golf carts. What followed was likely the coldest golf cart ride of my life, and likely of all your life as well. Instead of golf clubs on the back of the cart, instead sat my freezing cold body hoping to make it to the open house at the foundation’s main offices near the Capitol Building. Multiple checkpoints and a transition to walking in the snow later, Rick Carlton, the ultimate trooper with two new knees, and I had little choice but to turn around and go back to the hotel when we ran into the incoming President’s motorcade. My parents would continue to endure the bitter cold on the night of Monday the 20^th as well. As for specifics, you are free to inquire about their experience going to the inaugural ball. All I will tell you is that this year was certainly their last time in DC for a presidential inauguration.

Despite this apparent surrender, please do not despair for me. First of all, meeting with Jane Doe is still on course to happen soon, this time over Zoom. Hopefully my determination to meet her in the first place, despite all the security barriers, will show how profoundly interested I am in this sort of future. Furthermore, in case you were missing any serious political commentary today, I am pleased to inform you that I spent the actual moment of the swearing in at the conservative and defense-oriented think tank Hudson Institute, where I discussed with their Fellow Peter Rough the prospects for a peace agreement in Ukraine. While Rough admitted some policy disagreements with the president, he assured me that Hudson has more developed relationships within the Trump Administration than it ever had in the Biden Administration, particularly with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. In my honest opinion, these relationships are a good sign that a weak ceasefire agreement in Ukraine is not on the cards anytime soon.

And speaking of that president, I am about to make a bold claim here. Judging by his audacious, contentious, and some would even say reckless executive actions after barely a week in office, Donald Trump is on course to become the most powerful, and potentially transformative, president since Franklin Roosevelt. Just in case any of his supporters feel I am crossing over to the other side, there are quite a few Trump Administration reforms I wholeheartedly support- especially when they undo the worst excesses of the Biden Administration in the realms of diversity vs. merit and the US-Mexico border. The new administration has made clear that there ought to be a fundamental transformation of the manner this country conducts its business both at home and abroad. While Trump II’s shock-and-awe diplomacy will certainly give this author the occasional heart attack, the jury is still out on what the world will look like on January 20, 2029.