Appearance of military officers during Trump’s inaugural address still unexplained
By
Jerry White
23 January 2017
A strange and disturbing sequence took place behind President Donald Trump as he delivered his inaugural address Friday, which has gone virtually without comment in the news media.
Early in his address, ten military officers walked up and stood behind the president so they would prominently appear with Trump in the camera shots beamed across the US and the world. After 45 seconds, a Marine officer prompts the sailors and soldiers to leave, and they walk away.
The unusual incident prompted two comments during the New York Times live blog of the address. Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and the current executive editor at publisher Random House wrote, “The military guard behind him seems unusual; am I right?”
Maggie Haberman, the New York Times White House correspondent, responded, “Yes, and they have dispersed, but was it because it was raining?”
Meacham is presumably a well-informed commentator on inaugural protocol, having written a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson in 2009 and a 2012 biography of Thomas Jefferson. However, the Times, the Washington Post and other major dailies and news networks never commented on the event further. The only mention of it was in the celebrity gossip web site TMZ and in the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom.
The innocent explanation about protecting the president and his guests from the light drizzle does not seem credible. While the first Air Force officer comes down with an umbrella in hand at one minute into the speech, the other officers who appear 16 seconds later have nothing in their hands. What happened during that 16 seconds was not seen by most…