Democrats and others who fear or despise what Donald Trump has in store for us over the next four years have many decisions to make about how to cope with the new regime. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (especially given the plans and appointments he has already revealed) for a posture of total opposition. Something approaching an actual “resistance” may arise once the 47th president takes office and it all becomes very real.
But before January 20, it’s all potential rather than actual, which is one reason the talk of Democratic elected officials boycotting the inauguration, as USA Today reports many are considering, seems like a bad idea, one that signals the opposition’s weakness, not its resolution:
Should Democrats skip the inauguration, as more than 60 members of Congress did in 2017, or would it be wiser for them to attend and show that after a divisive contest, America’s democratic norms remain secure? After all, Trump didn’t attend Biden’s inauguration after the now-president defeated him in 2020.
The immediate reason for not emulating Trump’s conduct in 2020 is that Democrats are in the practice of respecting the will of the people as reflected in election results. For Democrats who are called to attend, they should avoid a boycott of the event commemorating those results just as they have avoided an insurrectionary effort to overturn them. The peaceful transition of power is central to our traditions as a constitutional democracy, which was precisely why it was so outrageous that the 45th president tried to disrupt it four years ago. His installment as the 47th president will be the last time Democrats have to bow to Trump’s power as a properly elected chief executive, but bow they must before getting down to the hard and essential work of fighting his agenda and the seedy cast of characters he has chosen to implement it.
Plenty of Americans who do not occupy the elected or appointed offices that normally require attendance at this quadrennial ritual won’t watch it or listen to it. Unless my employers ask me to write about it, I will be focused on the college-football national-championship game — which I am pleased Trump cannot spoil by attending (as he did the game I went to in 2018) because he will be otherwise occupied in Washington. I understand that treating the inauguration and its central figure as “normal” is exactly what leads people to think about staying far away as a gesture of protest. But I would argue for such protests to begin on January 21, with effective measures of opposition rather than empty gestures of denial.
