By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump is set to arrive in Washington on Saturday evening for an inauguration celebration marking his return to power that has been upended by record cold temperatures.
Trump will land in the area with his wife Melania in the early evening from his home base in Palm Beach, Florida, where the Republican had worked on his transition to power after winning the Nov. 5 election over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump is expected to head immediately to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington, where a crowd of some 500 guests will view a fireworks display and musical performances that include Leo Days, an Elvis impersonator and Christopher Macchio, a tenor whom Mr. Trump has previously featured at political events.
The 78-year-old Trump is due to hold a rally with supporters inside the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington on Sunday, the eve of his inauguration, as well as a post-inauguration event Monday afternoon. Trump will be sworn in at 12 p.m. ET.
A blast of frigid weather forecast for Monday prompted Trump to move the inaugural ceremonies from the iconic west front of the U.S. Capitol building to indoors in the Capitol Rotunda, and the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capital One Arena.
Most of the more than 220,000 ticketed guests who had been due to watch from the U.S. Capitol grounds will be unable to view the swearing-in inside the building. Just a fraction will be able to fit inside the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena where the U.S. Inauguration will be broadcast and parade entertainers and participants are expected to perform.
Trump will deliver his inaugural address, a speech that is typically intended to set the tone for the president’s new four-year term, from the rotunda inside the U.S. Capitol.
It will be the first time since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in January 1985 that the big event has been moved indoors.
Once he returns to the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump is expected to begin signing some of the dozens of executive orders and directives that he has planned to crack down on migration, boost U.S. energy production and other priorities.
Trump, whose first term was 2017-2021, had refused to attend the inauguration of the man who defeated him in 2020, Democrat Joe Biden. He left Washington for Florida ahead of the ceremony, vowing “we will be back in some form.”
Two weeks earlier, his supporters had attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to delay lawmakers from certifying Biden’s victory.
(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Heather Timmons and Diane Craft)
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