Politicians, preparing for inaugurals, scurry for their histories. The Republican Senator Roy Blunt, who welcomed the crowd to Donald Trump’s Inauguration, chose to commemorate the peaceful transitions of the late eighteenth century, when partisan tensions were high and the Republic might not have survived. The Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, speaking just before the new President, read at length from a letter that Sullivan Ballou, a Union officer, wrote to his wife: “I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us.” In the faces just behind the new President and his family, viewers could detect the partisan zigzag of our recent political history: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas. Clarence Thomas coaxed the new Administration into being in his magnificent, seldom-heard baritone. And yet, amid these displays of continuity, the new President insisted on a break. Trump spoke about a history in which power had been concentrated among élites and politicians, and said, “That all changes. Starting right here and right now.”
This was a dark inaugural. The America Trump described was filled with victims: of “inner city” poverty, of “crime and drugs and gangs,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” But even starker was how forcefully Trump compressed history. There were no nods to “the sacrifices borne by our ancestors,” which Obama spoke of in his first Inaugural Address, or to America’s values, or to its spirit. “For many decades,” Trump insisted, the country had “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry,” “defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” and “made other countries rich” while “the factories shuttered and left our shores.” The story of the country was a story of decline. “But that is the past, and now we are looking only to the future,” Trump said. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.”
In certain settings, the new President is chatty, a raconteur, but in his formal speeches he tends to speak in staccato: he makes lists, he raises and clenches his right fist. His vision is “America First,” he said again today, with no apparent concern for the ugly history of the term. (Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee opposed intervention in the Second World War.) The crowd on the Mall cheered, and Trump adjusted his gaze toward it. “The forgotten men and women,” Trump called his audience, as he had in his Convention speech. But when he described these people he made them sound passive; he promised they would be “protected.” The cameras captured some joy and pride in the crowds, but they also recorded that the crowds were relatively small. Soon there were side-by-side photos circulating of the crowds at Obama’s Inauguration, which filled the Mall and spilled out beyond it, and at Trump’s, which left sections of unfilled seats so broad that you could land a helicopter on them. Tickets to inaugural balls, which once cost twenty-five thousand dollars, were reportedly being given away for free. As the Inauguration ended, anarchists smashed a few windows several blocks north of the Mall, and larger, peaceful protests proceeded elsewhere in the city, with the largest demonstrations expected tomorrow. A new Fox News poll, which appeared the day before the Inauguration, found that only forty-two per cent of registered voters have a favorable opinion of Trump; fifty-five per cent feel unfavorably toward him.
The President is an unpopular populist. He insists on a break with the past. How many Americans actually want that?
For the past eighteen months, Trump has attempted to plunge the country into a relentless present tense. In his imagination there has been no history of social subjugation, just the residue of tension; no memory of poverty, just the frustrations of unattained wealth; no reminders of the fear and loneliness of life in violent or repressive countries, just the press of migrants and refugees against our own borders. For most Americans, this has been the curse of the long campaign year, to have been forever stuck in the news cycle. The realization today, with an Inaugural Address that replicated the grinding partisanship of the campaign, was that this is exactly as the President wants it.
During the ceremony, it was difficult not to notice the man’s oddities: the ludicrously long power tie; the way he leaned in to kiss his wife and missed her entirely; the jerky, impulsive bro-slap he gave to Mike Pence’s shoulder. During the benediction, the Energy Secretary-designate, Rick Perry, blew chewing-gum bubbles while his eyes were closed in prayer. In time, maybe these tics will simply be part of our visual furniture, in the same way that George W. Bush’s fratty smirk (which reappeared) once was, detached from any real menace. But, for the moment, they feel like clues to matters of greater weight: Trump’s moods and tempers, his grievances, his favorites. It is as if we are watching a king. Today, Melania Trump’s coat was pale blue and Michelle Obama’s was maroon, and that seemed to capture the day: patriotic, yes, but a few shades off.
