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Donald J. Trump has always tried to choose his own stage settings, be it looming over a built-for-TV boardroom in \u201cThe Apprentice\u201d or descending down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. For his second inauguration, nature did the choosing for him: Subfreezing weather in Washington prompted the event to move indoors<\/a>, to the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n With the ceremony moved from a massive public mall to an intimate chamber, TV was even more than usual the best means for most of us to secure a ticket. A traditional outdoor ceremony doesn\u2019t just allow more citizens to attend; it creates the theater of openness. The incoming president meets the people under the wide sky; the crowd provides a backdrop and a collective response \u2014 the symbol, at least, of the people\u2019s democratic voice.<\/p>\n The inauguration ceremony on Monday, held before a select crowd in the ornate and hushed chamber, felt more like a celebrity wedding (or funeral) or a black-tie gala, a small V.I.P. event that the masses could glimpse only through TV\u2019s window.<\/p>\n This feeling of exclusivity was underscored by the who\u2019s who of guests (Joe Rogan! Jake Paul!), whom the cameras picked out as if on a red carpet. The dais in the Rotunda was dotted with billionaire tech and media moguls, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. If a presidential inauguration is the Super Bowl of American politics, this time we were watching the event from the vantage of the owner\u2019s box.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The day\u2019s wall-to-wall news coverage treated Mr. Trump\u2019s second inauguration as something both familiar and highly unusual. (The event was, as Anderson Cooper said on CNN, \u201ca shift from the old to the new, which is also the old.\u201d) There was not the sense of stunned crisis that poured from the airwaves in 2017. But neither was there the ho-hum, dutiful lassitude that usually accompanies second inaugurations, like Barack Obama\u2019s in 2013.<\/p>\n Part of this, of course, owed to the setting and the dark memories it evoked<\/a>. Just over four years ago, the same networks covered live as a crowd of Trump supporters tramped through the Rotunda, having attacked police and breached the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden\u2019s 2020 electoral victory.<\/p>\n For the president to be lawfully sworn in on this same site had a feeling of irony, or of conquest. The usual bromides about \u201cthe peaceful transfer of power\u201d had to be followed with reminders that, last time, the transfer was anything but.<\/p>\n The moment was dramatic, but Mr. Trump\u2019s delivery was unusually sedate. The room, again, was probably responsible. Mr. Trump is a crowd performer, who lives for a boisterous throng to goad and affirm him. Reading off a teleprompter to a small group, even the most supportive coterie of pols and billionaires, he goes on autopilot.<\/p>\n He seemed livelier and more engaged speaking off-the-cuff to a group in the overflow room outside the Rotunda. \u201cI think this is a better speech than the one I made upstairs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The inauguration had, as it were, an inside voice and an outside voice. The outside voice was most manifest at the Capital One Arena, where Mr. Trump held a noisy rally<\/a> on Sunday and where he appeared before thousands of supporters Monday night. The news feeds occasionally cut to the boisterous arena, lit in lurid blood-red, as if showing MAGA\u2019s id and superego in split screen.<\/p>\n There was some whiplash in the coverage. Network desks tried to convey a sense of tradition and solemnity while scrambling to process a rush of Trump executive orders that made clear these were not ordinary times. At one point, Gayle King of CBS interrupted a report about Mr. Trump\u2019s plan to rename the Gulf of Mexico the \u201cGulf of America\u201d to spotlight the surreality of it all.<\/p>\n \u201cCan he do that?\u201d she asked. \u201cI mean, we say that like that\u2019s something that we\u2019ve heard of before or that\u2019s been done before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One thing we can safely say has not been done before by a newly inaugurated president: signing executive orders in a sports arena before thousands of fans, then throwing the pens into the cheering, dancing audience like a drummer tossing his sticks into the crowd after the last encore.<\/p>\n