Alejandra Whitney Smith plans to spend a week on a technology-free plane in preparation for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.
“[Inauguration weekend]coincides with my birthday weekend, and I spend all my time in Washington, D.C., but when the election happened, I was like, ‘Oh, no, I can’t be here.’ I said to myself,” Whitney Smith said. Her mother was working at the Library of Congress at the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “I remember not only the fear for my mother, but also the fear for me in the city. I just didn’t want to be around that kind of hostile negative energy.”
The Washington, D.C., resident said she plans to hole up in a cabin with four friends over Inauguration Weekend to do some vision boarding, self-reflection, and reconnect. Trump’s re-election “represents an ugly side of America that people don’t want to acknowledge,” she said.
Whitney Smith, who works as a lawyer, said: “I think people saw what happened during the first administration and mistakenly believed that we weren’t going to go backwards as a country.” . “But I also know the reality of living as a black woman in this country. As much as I wanted Harris to win, I still feel that America is not ready for its first black female president. was in me. Not only that, but she was running against Donald Trump, who has a very strong cult-like following.”
While Whitney Smith and some D.C. residents continue to process Trump’s inauguration and hope to leave the city, many conservatives and Republicans are excited about the upcoming inauguration. There is. Hotels in the city were 70% booked as of Wednesday, with prices ranging from $900 to $1,500 per night.
Despite holding the highest office in the United States, Trump has consistently distanced himself from Washington, D.C., both physically and ideologically. She lost the Republican primary in the District of Columbia to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and polled just 6.6 percent against her Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in the general election.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump denounced Washington as a “filthy, criminal disgrace to our country.” He has hired billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to cut the federal workforce and vowed to overhaul the nation’s capital, a move some say is aimed at disrupting the city’s established political order. be.
Trump’s first term as president was marked by events that brought conflict and chaos to the streets of Washington, including holding up a Bible at the site of a previously dispersed George Floyd protest. He has been less involved in the city’s cultural and political life than his predecessors, patronizing only his own restaurant at the Trump International Hotel and maintaining traditions such as the Kennedy Center Honors and the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. I avoided formal events.
The day after the election, Washington, D.C., resident Tia Butler emailed her relatives asking if any of them would be interested in “going on a cruise or other adventure from January 19th to 25th.” For Butler, participating in the Jan. 6 riot, when Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of electoral votes after the 2020 election, and the pro-life protests took place after the 2020 election. The memory of his encounter with these people makes him not want to be in town during the election period. About the inauguration celebration.
Butler originally planned to have guests in January, hoping for a different outcome, but now plans to spend the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in California.
“I have fundamental beliefs and values that are very different from those of the president-elect’s supporters, so it’s best for me to resign now,” said Butler, a human resources executive who spent nearly two years in the federal government. Ta. Decades before I started working at a nonprofit organization. “They say to me, we would rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of color, or we would rather have a criminal leading our country than a woman.”
June Williams Coleman has similar sentiments. In July 2024, the Houston-based doctor was at a clothing boutique on Martha’s Vineyard when he heard screaming around the TV inside the store. President Joe Biden had just announced that he would end his re-election campaign and support Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee.
“People were jumping up and down. It was a very powerful moment,” Coleman, 61, recalled. Everyone you met was so excited about it (Harris’ presidential candidacy). ”
Coleman was so confident in Harris’ chances that he bought a plane ticket to DC in anticipation of Harris’ possible inauguration on July 28, just a week after Biden’s announcement.
She said Harris’ inauguration “would have been unlike anything we’ve seen before because of the joy and the number of people who would participate,” adding that Harris and other historically Black colleges and universities and Black Greek organizations He pointed out the connection.
Instead of going to Washington, D.C., Colman plans to get his ticket refunded and spend the inauguration weekend at Lake Tahoe with his 15-year-old daughter.
“In 2016, when Hillary (Clinton) lost, we came to D.C. again in 2017 because of the Women’s March,” Colman said, acknowledging the lingering political grief. . “I wanted my daughter to see it too because it was so exciting. But it’s not the same now.”
