Today, inauguration day, it's got me thinking about an old TV show, Battlestar Galactica.

It ran on the sci-fi channel in the early 2000s.

There was this one line that was central to the series.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

They were talking about stuff like robots and resurrection, so this is not a one-for-one

comparison. But today, Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as president. I can't help but feel

like we were just here. All of this has happened before. All of this will

happen again. It is surprising to me that Trump hasn't been the president for like three weeks

or a month already. I keep having to remind myself that. That's my colleague Ben Mathis Lilley,

a senior writer here at Slate.

We were talking about how ever since Election Day, time has felt kind of funny.

I don't know about you, but to me, November seems like a really long time ago.

Like we've been in this limbo.

Donald Trump isn't president yet, but he's never really gone away.

It certainly seems like he's been driving the bus,

driving the ship of state, steering the step of state

for the last month or so.

And even the things that Biden, Joe Biden, has done,

like wimping out on the TikTok ban and getting this hopefully ceasefire done in Gaza

seemed to have been largely driven by the realization within the White House that, hey, Trump is going to do this stuff anyway.

So like, let's try to be cooperative.

It's supposed to be cold in Washington, D.C. today. So cold that the big guy himself decided to hold his inauguration inside. It's a break with tradition, sure, although at least we won't have to go through another news cycle about crowd sizes. But honestly, demand for tickets was reportedly pretty high.

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