Friday, January 15, 2021
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration theme will be “America United,” but the celebration will take place against a backdrop of a fortified U.S. Capitol that was ransacked two weeks earlier in a stark demonstration of how deeply divided the country has become.
Security around the presidential inauguration has always been tight. This year, the District of Columbia looks like a fortress following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that left six dead and served as a wake-up call of just how great a threat is posed by violent, anti-government extremists.
Up to 25,000 National Guardsmen are expected in Washington, D.C. to provide security and aid law enforcement around the inauguration. That’s five times the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Roughly 3,000 of those troops are garrisoned at the U.S. Capitol which has been surrounded by 7-foot non-scalable fencing topped with razor wire. Photos of guardsmen sprawled inside the hallways of Congress documented the first time since the Civil War that troops have been deployed overnight to the Capitol.
In another throwback to the Civil War era, Biden to change his plans to arrive in Washington by train amid security concerns. …
