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Live music has been a significant part of every Presidential Inauguration since 1789, when George Washington journeyed on horseback from Mount Vernon to New York City, and was fêted en route by various composers, including the German-American violinist Philip Phile, who used the occasion to début a new piece, “The President’s March.” (Washington was tense during his voyage, writing in his diary that he was “oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express,” and admitting that he felt increasingly uncertain about bidding adieu “to private life, and to domestic felicity.”) The Inauguration ceremony has only grown more elaborate and campy in subsequent decades, and, in the modern era, it usually involves one or two or three extravagantly dressed and jittery pop stars. This year, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks performed during the event, which is scheduled to be followed, on Wednesday evening, by a pr
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Cleveland Grover Meredith, Jr., who goes by Cleve, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. His father owns a hundred-year-old company that makes utility poles, and his mother was a homemaker who later became an interior decorator. He had two sisters, one of whom died young, of brain cancer. He attended the prestigious Lovett School, in north Atlanta, where nearly all his classmates were white, and where, a few of those classmates told me recently, the N-word was occasionally heard in the hallways making it “depressingly similar,” one said, to many schools in the area at the time. Meredith was an upbeat kid. One of his classmates, Dean Temple, who is now a stage actor, recalled a class trip to the U.S. Capitol. Most of the details were fuzzy, Temple said, but he could still recall “the smile on Cleve’s face.”
There will be time to assess Trump’s criminal liability for his role in inciting the insurrection. Right now, the urgent issue is the danger of having him remain President.