Trump Returns, and So Does His TV Spectacle

The president’s second inauguration began with somber pageantry and ended with a reality-TV document signing.

Donald J. Trump has always tried to choose his own stage settings, be it looming over a built-for-TV boardroom in “The Apprentice” or descending down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. For his second inauguration, nature did the choosing for him: Subfreezing weather in Washington prompted the event to move indoors, to the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

With the ceremony moved from a massive public mall to an intimate chamber, TV was even more than usual the best means for most of us to secure a ticket. A traditional outdoor ceremony doesn’t just allow more citizens to attend; it creates the theater of openness. The incoming president meets the people under the wide sky; the crowd provides a backdrop and a collective response — the symbol, at least, of the people’s democratic voice.

The inauguration ceremony on Monday, held before a select crowd in the ornate and hushed chamber, felt more like a celebrity wedding (or funeral) or a black-tie gala, a small V.I.P. event that the masses could glimpse only through TV’s window.

This feeling of exclusivity was underscored by the who’s who of guests (Joe Rogan! Jake Paul!), whom the cameras picked out as if on a red carpet. The dais in the Rotunda was dotted with billionaire tech and media moguls, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. If a presidential inauguration is the Super Bowl of American politics, this time we were watching the event from the vantage of the owner’s box.

The day’s wall-to-wall news coverage treated Mr. Trump’s second inauguration as something both familiar and highly unusual. (The event was, as Anderson Cooper said on CNN, “a shift from the old to the new, which is also the old.”) There was not the sense of stunned crisis that poured from the airwaves in 2017. But neither was there the ho-hum, dutiful lassitude that usually accompanies second inaugurations, like Barack Obama’s in 2013.

Part of this, of course, owed to the setting and the dark memories it evoked. Just over four years ago, the same networks covered live as a crowd of Trump supporters tramped through the Rotunda, having attacked police and breached the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.