No, Trump Will NOT Be Sworn in as the 18th President on March 4th

There's an idea making the rounds that, despite having lost the election, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president on the "real" Inauguration Day, March 4th. Believers in this assertion maintain that Washington D.C. is "foreign soil" and that President Biden's oath of office is null and void. Adherents to this view point to the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 to support their ideas. According to them, in 1871 the District of Columbia was organized as a corporation separate from the rest of the United States and subject to international banking laws, making the district, no longer a part of the United States of America, but a separate, foreign, entity. Related ideas, which first saw the light of day in conjunction with the "sovereign citizen" movement, further claim that the United States ceased to be a Republic at this time and the whole country was now a corporation called THE UNITED STATES CORPORATION (they apparently feel that the use of all capitals in this case is significant). This makes any Constitutional amendments passed after 1871 null and void, and any presidents who served after 1871 illegitimate. Many in the sovereign citizen movement use this rationale to assert that the government of the United States as we know it has no authority over them; QAnon Trumpers have taken this belief one step further, fantasizing that Trump will somehow reverse the supposed illegal conversion of the U.S. into a corporation and be sworn in as the eighteenth president of the United States (Grant, as the seventeenth, was the last legitimate president according to this world view).

There are a few problems with this whole scenario. 

The seat of the nascent United States government was to be a ten mile square (10 miles x 10 miles) at a site chosen by Congress. The district was created from land ceded by the states of Maryland and Virginia and initially was a square, ten miles on a side. Within this square, the cities of Georgetown, Maryland and Arlington, Virginia already existed. The new city of Washington was designated as the nation's capital city. Each of the cities maintained their own municipal governments. In 1846 the portion of the district on the Virginian side was returned to Virginia. 

There were many reorganizations that took place over the years. Before the infamous 1871 act, the city of Washington (which was incorporated in 1802 by the way) and the district area outside the city were administered separately, with several changes to the method of administration over the years. The 1871 act merged Washington, Georgetown and the unincorporated areas of the district into one territory, and appointed a territorial governor. It's at this point that the district was incorporated. This does not mean that it became an independent corporation, like General Motors or Amazon, but it was, and still is, the method by which an unorganized area becomes organized into a recognized entity. Every city, town and village in the country is a corporation. Occasionally you'll run across small towns that are unincorporated. This is not some insidious plot to move the seat of government by sleight-of-hand outside the jurisdiction of the Constitution. It's a mundane, ordinary, run-of-the-mill way of organizing a municipality. The idea that the District of Columbia is a foreign entity is a fringe idea not supported by facts. The associated idea that this 1871 Organic Act not only turned DC into a foreign entity, but abolished the United States as a Republic but turned it into a corporation that somehow is existing in some legal limbo has even less solid ground to stand on. Trumpists are grasping, not only at straws, but imaginary straws, in order to keep the hope that their savior, in the face of defeat after defeat, will prevail.