This photograph, taken late last Friday, shows me at home with the protest placards just painted and mounted by my wife, Peggy. She and her daughter, Emma, carried them in Washington yesterday, joining half a million others there in a vast show of celebration and resistance. I attended in spirit and was intensely proud of their part in this famous event. I shared their bundled-up demands for reproductive rights, equal pay for women, L.G.B.T. rights, voting access and other First Amendment freedoms, the constitutional protection of religion, public safety, urgent care for our shattered environment, and more.
This is a large bill, but Peggy and Emma were also bearing some more personal questions of mine. As I have said, this was my nineteenth Presidential election, and, for me, the most important one of them all. I did not vote for Mr. Trump, for reasons I’ve put out in this space before, but I look on him now as my President. I’m a lifelong liberal Democrat, but, even after elections that startled and disappointed me, I always felt part of the process and at peace with it.
On Friday, I watched the Inaugural from start to finish—Peggy, like many others, could not bring herself to do this—and listened for some phrase or even some tone of voice from the new President that would include me in this familiar and eloquent process. It never came—“Black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots” didn’t do it for me—which oddly put me at one with three former Presidents, and his distinguished electoral opponent, and many dozens of honorable public servants near him up there on the steps of the Capitol. This is not presumptuous of me to put myself in their number. What I strongly wanted and expected from him is what they wanted and expected as well: a sense of togetherness and joint participation in this storied American experiment. This omission will remain, I believe, because our President Trump has given no sign that he understands any feelings so private, and so deeply felt, as our pride and excitement in this endless committee meeting.
The President’s obtuseness and rudeness are not just a part of the ugly recent Republican obstructionism and negativity but have to do with his personal deficiencies. I can’t imagine him listening to anyone like me without taking our disagreement personally. I have become a bad guy and a loser and should expect to be insulted or attacked in return. This still shocks me and makes me sorry for us all, and even a bit sorry for him. He has been deprived of comity—the creaky old word, which embodies courtesy and neighborly awareness, fits here—which leaves him isolated indeed and deprives us of a trustworthy leader.
This thought came back to me again yesterday, when I was taking in the massed hundreds of thousands in Washington and New York, and in so many other places around this country and all around the world; I was also getting calls or bulletins from my family on the streets and from friends on the sidewalks in familiar smaller places like Ellsworth, Maine. Suddenly and weirdly, I wondered if I could imagine Donald Trump himself marching in such company and losing himself in a great multitude—a dot in the photo, full of conviction and hope. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t find him anywhere.
