After what felt like three hours inside the arctic, two people from opposite sides of the coin met at the white marble steps of the U.S. Capitol building in pitch darkness – two 18-year-olds from Illinois now in Washington, D.C., experiencing a historic event in very different ways.
When I came home for winter break, I decided to go to a friend-group reunion. The party was casual – no fancy clothes, no partners and no talking about how terrible the Chicago Bears were doing – just classic guy time. Soda cans and Jimmy John’s sandwiches littered the black leather ottoman my friend group utilized while playing our favorite game, Cards Against Humanity.
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During the middle of the game, my good friend Aidan Maier began to tell us about his adventure with a few of our mutual friends, including Charlie Mandziara. Of course, out of curiosity, I asked, “How is Charlie doing?”
Maier responded, “He is doing good, you know he’s going to Trump’s inauguration right?”
“I’m not surprised,” I responded. “But that’s funny how we are both going to the inauguration.”
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Charlie Mandziara is a former classmate of mine from Downers Grove South High School in the Chicago suburbs. He is now a freshman political science major at Ball State University in Indiana. Mandziara is a Republican and even volunteered at the Iowa Caucus for the Trump campaign in 2024.
Mandziara and I settled for a dinner interview at Pierce Tavern in the heart of Downers Grove before he went back to Ball State. The tavern itself was a cozy, modern tavern with old brick walls and a long bar with booze bottles shining from the vintage lights draping down from the ceiling.
Mandziara sat alone, waiting for me. After good food and catching up, I clicked the record button on my note-taking app and sat down in a plastic blue chair while Mandziara also clicked the record on his iPhone. Then the questions began.
“So tell me a bit about your journey to getting the invite to the capital,” I said.
“I’ve been to political events all over the country, like CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), Amfest and the RNC (Republican National Convention) although it was after I met Trump,” he replied. “I met some guys who volunteered to work for politicians and Trump and they offered to carpool out to the Iowa Caucus and volunteer for the Trump campaign.”
At the Iowa Caucus, Mandziara made phone calls on behalf of the Trump campaign. Mandziara recalls a funny moment from when he was nearly feet away from Trump
“This one lady called him a name and I said ‘It’s Mr. President,’ Mandziara reminisced. “I corrected her while he was there.”
A few weeks after the election, a different friend of Mandziara’s working for the Trump campaign asked Mandziara if he was going to the inauguration or not.
“I was like, ‘oh, I’m going to the inauguration,’” Mandziara said. “Even if I’m in the way back of the crowd, it’d be worth it to just say I was there.”
Mandziara got the tickets to go to the inauguration after our conversation. We both went our separate ways, both going back to our respective colleges, both with a hesitancy about the event that lay ahead.
I arrived in D.C. on Jan.19 and immediately went straight to work alongside my co-workers at the Make America Great Again Victory Rally at Capital One Arena. Four hours in the cold rain shifted to hail and slowly froze to snow, which felt like nothing on my reddish purplish hands as I interviewed people waiting in line for the rally. I got a text from Mandaziara asking if I wanted to meet him at the back of the U.S. Capitol building and of course, I had to say yes.
Editor-in-chief Lylee Gibbs, student managing editor Dominique Martinez-Powell and I walked to the south side of the Capitol Building. During our journey, the sun had set to pitch-dark, which left me to walk around the southside of the Capitol building on the phone scrambling to find Mandziara. Then standing in front of the steps was a person I had been waiting to see ever since I got to D.C.
Mandziara greeted me with a formal handshake. As the Capitol police kicked Mandziara, his friends, my co-workers and I out of the capitol grounds I was able to walk and catch up with him.
“I have been enjoying (Washington D.C.),” Mandziara told me. “ We were a little rained in but we’ve made our way to all the sites we have wanted to see, like the Washington Monument.”
Due to the cold weather – which also turned my hands into a raspberry red – the Trump inauguration was moved inside of the Capitol rotunda for the first time since the second Ronald Regan administration. Mandziara tickets to the inauguration were shifted from the capitol building to the Capital One Arena.
“Anyone who had a ticketing issue was going to that now, that’s the new event they put on for everybody,” Mandziara said.
Mandziara and I took one last photo together before shaking hands and walking away in the same direction. While Mandziara walked away into the dark D.C. night, I thought about how he and I are like two opposite sides of a coin of an inauguration.
On one side of the coin, you have Mandziara. A person who is in D.C. to witness history unfold right in front of their eyes. While on the other side of the coin, you have me, a person who was in D.C. to record the history unfolding in front of their own eyes. Both of these sides combine together to form something of value.
A memory, a story, a lesson to name a few valuable things one might find from an event like this. But like all coins, we wonder if they will be lost inside of our pants pockets or will be saved in a special place, while we watch its value grow over time.
Will Elliott can be reached at welliott@dailyegyptian.com
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