Friday 20 January 2017, Washington DC: overcast skies with the threat of rain for the inauguration of the new president, Donald J Trump. All of Washington was there: former presidents, senior politicians, supreme court justices and, in the seats furthest from the action, the Washington diplomatic corps. But our viewpoint, on the uppermost levels of the temporary amphitheatre erected on the West Front of the Capitol, allowed us to see beyond the stage, all the way down the National Mall; and note that the crowd below looked rather smaller than the 1.8 million estimated to have attended Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.
Trump would say afterwards that the rain stopped, as if by divine intervention, at the moment he began to deliver his inaugural address. We diplomats in the gallery had exactly the opposite impression – that the heavens opened just as the speech started, with Trump’s opening words drowned out by the rustle of several hundred plastic ponchos being unfolded and donned (with George W Bush memorably failing to locate the appropriate aperture in his, and resorting to draping it over his head like a collapsed umbrella).
