As shock and awe hit Washington, Robert Moore feels the chill – and the irony – at Trump’s inauguration
Forgive me for having whiplash. The inauguration of Donald Trump was astonishing enough for most reporters and political observers gathered in Washington amid a polar vortex of brutally cold temperatures, but the decision to move the elaborate ceremony indoors made it particularly surreal for me. For where did the inaugural events take place? They unfolded in the magnificent Rotunda, the sacred space of US democracy directly below the dome of the United States Capitol.
This was the exact same space where, four years and 14 days earlier, we had filmed a mob of Trump loyalists fighting their way through the Capitol. Along with my ITV News camera operator, Mark Davey, and a producer, Sophie Alexander, I watched the skirmishes unfold around the statues of America’s revered leaders and alongside the revolutionary-era paintings.
Four years later, on this bitterly cold January day, Trump was himself standing in the Rotunda, displaying no sense of irony, swearing loyalty to the US constitution.
It is impossible not to reflect on the vicissitudes of American politics. How did voters give such a striking mandate to a man who had come so close to overturning the constitutional order?
After a year of covering the US presidential election campaign – from the primaries at the start of 2024 through to the tumult of Joe Biden dropping out, and the drama of the twin assassination attempts against Trump – I could clearly see this election was not just focused on Trump but was also about deep voter dissatisfaction. American voters were heartily frustrated – furious, actually – with the Biden economy. Every trip to the grocery store felt like a mugging.
In an election documentary for ITV, I filmed with a woman in Erie, Pennsylvania, who was selling her blood to a medical clinic to pay for food. I spent time with black farmers in Georgia on the brink of bankruptcy. And I saw the despair of a young black voter in Detroit who told me that the Democrats make promises every four years and then deliver absolutely nothing to the poorest urban communities in America.
The American Dream has been defined as the belief that you have the chance to be more prosperous than your parents. In that sense, the dream has become a nightmare. People are working harder and harder and still struggling to put food on the table. It isn’t a surprise that Americans voted to turn their back on the Biden-Harris economy.
The sight of Trump signing the executive orders pardoning the 6 January insurrectionists was quite the exclamation mark on a remarkable inauguration day. For the next two nights I was camped outside the grim DC city jail when several of the prisoners - “the J6ers”, as they are known - emerged. Collapsing into the arms of family members holding a vigil outside, they declared their lasting loyalty to Trump.
Looking on was Stewart Rhodes, former leader of the Oath Keepers militia. He was among those now free and feeling emboldened. He told ITV News that his militiamen would be able to offer security on the streets in the face of any leftist “resistance” to the Trump agenda.
The next day, I headed down to North Carolina to interview a released 6 January prisoner, Josh Pruitt, who I have stayed in touch with over the last four years.
In a strange way, we became friends while he was behind bars. I would send him books to read. He’d call me on a recorded prison phone line every month to tell me what was going on inside one of America’s most violent jails. Now we were in a bar, playing pool, and he was enjoying his first beer for a long time.
Did he regret anything he did four years ago?
“Honestly, I don’t,” he told me. “I would do it all again. And if there is a bonus to being in jail after 6 January, it’s that I missed almost the entirety of the Biden presidency.”
Robert Moore is an ITV News correspondent, based in Washington. He was the only TV reporter in the world embedded with the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021. His latest ITV documentary, tracking the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency, will be broadcast in April.
