Among the more notable events occurring in the D.C. area on Wednesday is President Trump’s farewell ceremony at 8 a.m. at Joint Base Andrews just outside the city. But due to the president’s longtime habit of spurning business associates and political figures once their services have been rendered — and his post-insurrection status as a pariah to almost everyone except Republican voters — it appears there are concerns that the event may be poorly attended.
On Sunday night, former White House director of communications Anthony Scaramucci said that even he had been invited to the good-bye party. “Trust me, that had to be a mass email if one of them got sent to me,” he told Inside Edition. That Scaramucci got an invite to Trump’s final presidential event suggests a wide net of invitations: The financier who was kicked out of the administration in 2017 after ten days for griping on the record about office politics became a vocal Trump critic following the El Paso shooting in 2019, when the president gave a thumbs up in a picture with a baby orphaned in the attack. That Trump — who values loyalty above most everything else — allegedly invited an opportunist who twice violated his allegiance suggests that the White House could be desperate to put bodies in the crowd.
Another concerning sign came from the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus, who reported that “some recipients” on Wednesday’s guest list “have been surprised the invite offered them five guests.” In the wake of the Capitol riot and his partial sabotage of the effort to secure a Republican Senate majority, and amid reports of an isolated president inside a shrinking inner circle, if Trump is inviting distant ex-staffers and a basketball-starting-lineup’s worth of their closest friends, the ceremony could be a quiet one.
As the hours of the his presidency waned, more and more Trump administration officials are cordially declining their invites:
The president, who has developed an astonishingly devoted fan base, will never be without an audience: In one post-insurrection poll, two-thirds of Republicans who answered said that the events of January 6 had not changed their feelings about Trump. (Twenty-eight percent said that Trump’s actions spurring on the riot made them feel better about their support.) But the apparent crowd problems for Trump’s final presidential event highlight some of the challenges ahead for the president whose golf courses have been rebuffed by the PGA, whose longtime lender has dropped him, and whose neighbors have petitioned the town of Palm Beach to stop him from living at Mar-a-Lago.
