Good morning. It’s Donald Trump’s final day as president — and Joe Biden’s first. |
 | | Franklin D. Roosevelt at his final inauguration in 1945.George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images |
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A presidential inauguration in the United States is usually a celebration of democracy. |
Hundreds of thousands of people descend on Washington to watch a newly elected president take the oath of office. A departing president signals his respect for the country by celebrating the new one, even when that departing president is disappointed by the election’s outcome — as was the case with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and others. |
“I grew up in the Washington area, and inaugurations have always been a time of hope and fresh beginnings regardless of party,” Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, told me. |
But when American democracy is under siege, an inauguration can have a very different feel. That was true in 1945, when the U.S. was fighting fascism in World War II, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration was a spartan affair. It was true in 1861, when the country was on the verge of war and Abraham Lincoln was the target of an assassination plot. It was true again four years later, when smallpox was raging and the Civil War was nearing its end. |
The day will still be a triumph of democracy in the most important way: A defeated president’s attempt to overturn a fair election has failed, as has a violent attack on Congress by his supporters. The election’s winner, Joe Biden, will be sworn in as president around noon Eastern, just after the new vice president, Kamala Harris. |
Nonetheless, American democracy is under siege. Washington resembles an armed encampment, with visitors barred from many places, fences surrounding the National Mall and troops lining the streets. Trump will not attend the event, and many of his supporters believe his false claims. |
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Peter, who has covered every White House since Clinton’s and who first covered an inauguration as a junior reporter in 1985, the start of Ronald Reagan’s second term. “It’s surreal to see our city become such an armed camp. It reminds me of Baghdad or Kabul back when I covered those wars, but I never imagined we would see it quite this way in Washington.” |
Below, we briefly look back at the three inaugurations most similar to today’s — from 1945, 1865 and 1861. |
 | | Abraham Lincoln stood under a wood canopy for his first inauguration.Library of Congress |
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Several Southern states seceded after Abraham Lincoln’s election, and one newspaper described fears that “armed bands” would try to thwart his inauguration. A plot to kill Lincoln forced him to sneak into Washington in the early morning. |
On Inauguration Day, cavalry members flanked Lincoln’s procession, soldiers blocked streets and roof-mounted snipers eyed the crowd. The first sentence on the front page of the next day’s New York Times: “The day to which all have looked with so much anxiety and interest has come and passed. ABRAHAM LINCOLN has been inaugurated, and ‘all’s well.’” |
 | | Black soldiers were among the crowd at Lincoln’s second inauguration.Alexander Gardner, via Library of Congress |
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A Times account — by the poet Walt Whitman — noted that as the president spoke, “a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appeared like a hovering bird, right over him.” |
 | | A small crowd at the White House for F.D.R.’s fourth inauguration.Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress |
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Security concerns and wartime austerity turned Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration into “the simplest inauguration on record” with “the smallest ever” crowd, The Times wrote. |
The public portions of the event lasted just 15 minutes, partly because Roosevelt was ailing. He trembled as he stood on the South Portico of the White House to deliver a brief address. Less than three months later, he would die of a cerebral hemorrhage. By the end of that summer, the U.S. had won the wars in both Europe and Asia. |
- Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, blamed Trump for the Capitol riot, saying the mob had been “provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
- In his final hours in office, Trump granted 143 pardons and commutations, including Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, one of his top fund-raisers in 2016. You can find more notable pardons here.
- In his four years in office, Trump used Twitter to praise, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and to amplify his scorn. Here are all of his insults.
- Americans are looking back: “In the last four years, has there been a day when Trump wasn’t somewhere in your orbit?” (This six-minute video revisits memorable moments from his presidency.)
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- The Senate began confirmation hearings for five of Biden’s cabinet nominees. But delays mean he will probably become the first president in decades to take office without his national security team in place.
- Kamala Harris will swear in three new Democratic senators — Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Alex Padilla of California — after she becomes vice president, giving Democrats narrow control of the Senate.
- Biden will propose an immigration bill today that would give undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship and let “Dreamers” apply for permanent residency.
- The National Guard removed two troops from inauguration service because of possible links to right-wing extremist movements.
- These photos show Biden’s long road to the presidency.
- Can Biden take his Peloton with him to the White House? Yes, cybersecurity experts say, but the bike may need some adjustments.
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 | | A vigil at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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- The U.S. declared that China was committing genocide through its repression of Uighurs, a Muslim minority group. China has sent hundreds of thousands of people to indoctrination camps and has forced women to undergo sterilization.
- A court in Bangkok sentenced a woman to more than 43 years in prison for criticizing Thailand’s monarchy. The government has pursued more such cases since antigovernment protests last year.
- Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of the Alibaba Group, made a video appearance, his first public sighting since criticizing Chinese regulators in October.
- The Mets fired Jared Porter, their recently hired general manager, after a report that he sexually harassed a journalist in 2016.
- A 36-year-old man from California managed to live undetected at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago for three months. The authorities arrested him on Saturday.
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 | | India’s cricket team celebrated in Brisbane yesterday.Darren England/AAP , via Reuters |
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From Opinion: Senate Democrats should abolish the filibuster to make progress on climate change, civil rights and more, Adam Jentleson argues. |
Lives Lived: As the only child of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, Mary Catherine Bateson was once one of the most famous babies in America. She grew up to become a polymathic scholar, and her 1989 book about the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives became a classic. Bateson died at 81. |
 | | Frans Hals’s “Two Laughing Boys” after its recovery in 2011.Ilvy Njiokiktjien/ANP, via Getty Images |
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The paintings thieves love |
Some famous paintings are stolen more than once. Since 1988, for example, thieves have stolen a Frans Hals painting valued at more than $10 million from a small Dutch museum three times, most recently in August. |
Selling these paintings on the open market is impossible. So why do thieves covet them? Having been stolen before, the works have a track record that shows people are still willing to pay a lot of money for them — either on the black market or through ransom. |
Thieves sometimes sell stolen masterpieces to criminals, who in turn might use them as leverage to reduce sentences for other crimes, The Art Newspaper reports. And in the case of the Hals painting, an insurance company and the Dutch authorities once paid a ransom fee of more than $250,000. Lately, though, authorities and insurers have become reluctant to pay up, believing they’re encouraging future thefts. |
 | | Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times |
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The late-night hosts reflected on Trump’s final full day as president. |
The pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was backfill. Today’s puzzle is above — or you can play online if you have a Games subscription. |
If you enjoy this daily puzzle, consider a New York Times Games subscription. You’ll get full access to Spelling Bee, the Crossword, and more of our original games. Start playing today. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
P.S. The Times’s website debuted 25 years ago this week. “With its entry on the Web,” an article at the time noted, “The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age.” |
 | | Screenshots are scarce from The Times’s first year on the web. Here’s what it looked like in October 1996. |
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Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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