“A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before,” President Donald Trump declared at his second inauguration, which he had moved indoors due to subfreezing temperatures.

Presidential inaugurations in the United States are typically subject to cold temperatures and sunny rhetoric—“Americans…turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom” beamed Ronald Reagan in his second inaugural address, also held indoors because it was around 7 degrees outside.

Below, we present a selection from our archives about the language and pomp at the inaugurations of presidents Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Masha Gessen
The Styrofoam Presidency 

“Hope somehow persisted that the fact of becoming president would somehow elevate Trump—as though his aesthetics were not a reflection of his entire political self but merely a style that could be dropped when the occasion demanded it. But when the inauguration came, Trump, for twenty-four hours, not only trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power; he made a spectacle of it.”

—January 24, 2017

Darryl Pinckney
What He Really Said

President Obama’s first inauguration was the first time black people had come to Washington in great numbers, but not to protest.

—February 26, 2009

Darryl Pinckney
Beyond the Fringe

At George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, the National Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time ever. Such stringent measures may have been inconsistent with America’s ideals, but not, apparently, with its laws.

—February 22, 2001

Francine du Plessix Gray
Old Times

Richard Nixon’s self-denial, self-mythologizing, and self-discipline were on full display at his 1973 inauguration.

—February 22, 1973

Russell Baker
A Revolutionary President

“Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn’t know.”

—February 12, 2009

Larry McMurtry
The Two Lives of General Grant

“There is one photograph, taken on Inauguration Day in 1869, just as Grant is about to become president, when he appears to be clean and sober, though not happy. Perhaps Julia Dent Grant, his formidable wife, had concentrated her efforts that special day in seeing that her husband had his shirt correctly buttoned and his tie tied, neither of which would likely have been the case in day-to-day life.”

—April 29, 2004

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