As Trump paraded through the capital, violence broke out just a few blocks away
When Donald Trump made his way to the White House after he had been sworn in as the country’s 45th President, he may, or may not, have been able to detect the whiff of burning.
Just a couple of hours before Mr Trump sat and watched a military parade and prepared to head off to the traditional inaugural balls, protesters had clashed with riot police in streets not far away, an event
unprecedented at a presidential inauguration. Protesters set fire to at least one vehicle and smashed windows, while police fired tear gas and pushed people back with shields. More than 200 people were arrested and six police officers were hurt.
When he spoke to the nation on yesterday afternoon for the first time after taking the 35-word oath with which he became president, Mr Trump delivered a populist, nationalist rallying cry in which he vowed that “this moment on, it’s going to be America first”.
But even as he was delivering his speech in a grey, rain-spattered city, it was clear that many of those gathered in Washington DC did not accept him as their president. Reuters said that aerial pictures of the crowds of Mr Trump’s supporters on the Mall showed a much smaller turnout than eight years ago, when Barack Obama, the outgoing commander-in-chief, was himself sworn in. Estimates of yesterday’s crowd size were not immediately available.
Washington’s K Street is known as the heart of the city’s lobbying industry, part of the “swamp” that Mr Trump has vowed to drain. Yet yesterday, it was also the site of the worst clashes with police.
Outside the offices of the Washington Post newspaper, protesters smashed in the windows of and then set fire to a parked limousine. Before fire services and police could intervene, an anarchist symbol and the words "We The People" were daubed on its side.
Mirroring the inaugural parade going on a few blocks away, protesters linked arms and marched chanting "No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA". They tried to face off with police lines, who deployed streams of pepper spray.
Some protesters said that police had acted without need, choosing to push back demonstrators. Others said that a small number of demonstrators had been violent.
At another flash point, one protester hurled an object through the passenger window of a police van, which sped away in reverse as demonstrators cheered. Earlier, activists wearing masks used chunks of pavement and baseball bats to shatter the windows of a branch of Bank of America and a McDonald's restaurant, apparently targeted as overt symbols of American capitalism.
Smaller sympathy protests were due to be staged in cities across America and the world. In San Francisco, thousands formed a human chain on the Golden Gate Bridge and chanted "Love Trumps hate". In the city's financial district, a few hundred protesters blocked traffic outside an office building partly owned by Trump.
In Atlanta, protests converged at City Hall and a few hundred people chanted and waved signs protesting Trump, denouncing racism and police brutality and expressing support for immigrants, Muslims and the Black Lives Matter movement.
And in Nashville, half a dozen protesters chained themselves to the doors of the Tennessee Capitol. Hundreds also sat in a 10-minute silent protest at a park while Trump took the oath of office. Organisers led a prayer, sang patriotic songs and read the Declaration of Independence aloud.