Ahead of the inauguration, organisers had said that about 220,000 tickets would be distributed to watch the event’s on the grounds of the US Capitol.

Those without tickets would also have been able to view the ceremonies on the National Mall.

Alternate plans will now be required for those visitors, as well as the tens of thousands of others expected in the city.

Trump said that other inaugural events, including his rally on Sunday and three separate official inaugural balls on Monday evening, would take place as planned.

The move indoors means a much more limited capacity at Monday’s swearing-in for Trump, who is known to closely track attendance figures at his public events.

After his first inauguration, he claimed a “million and half people” had attended on the National Mall.

But crowd-size experts said the numbers were about a third of the estimated 800,000 to one million people who attended Barack Obama’s one in 2009.

Only about 1,000 people attended Joe Biden’s inauguration on the Capitol grounds because of Covid-19 restrictions.

In 1841, then-President William Henry Harrison, 68, gave the longest inauguration speech in US history in cold, wet conditions.

He caught a cold and subsequently pneumonia, and died exactly one month later, making his presidency the shortest in US history.