The only thing he didn’t do was invoke Hannibal Lecter.
The rest of the pieces of Donald Trump’s standard rally speech were there for his second inaugural address Monday: the meaningless lies, the empty chest-beating threats, the insane repetition of “as never before” braggadocio, a pandemic of pandering and self-promotion.
Trump’s inaugural address omitted one of his greatest expectations, repeated time and again on the campaign trail, that he would end the war in Ukraine before he was inaugurated.
There were high points in the grotesquerie — he’s going to “take back” the Panama Canal because we have been “treated so badly” and somehow China owns it now, or something; he’s going to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, which means, we must assume, another map assaulted by a Trump sharpie, and by God, that will be that!
Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations, as he pledged, is so empty a threat, it’s as if a piece of paper in Washington D.C. will scare guys wearing respirators in a fentanyl lab down in Zacatecas. Feeding red meat to the Christian Nationalist right that there will now be two “official” genders is not just a rhetorical bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos, it will have real effects on the lives of real transgender people — and in the Rotunda of the nation’s Capitol on Martin Luther King Remembrance Day, it got a rousing cheer.
If you were looking for a theme for the new Trump presidency, he gave us one: “A new golden age of America,” which for me, anyway, invoked images of the Trump Tower lobby’s mix of knick-knacks and 80’s “luxury” writ large. It’s all he can do, really — sell an alleged idea like real estate. It’s the biggest, it’s the tallest, it’s got more floors, it’s the most expensive, it’s got more gold leaf, and as we know from Donald Trump’s past, a likelihood of bankruptcy, therefore, looms.
That’s the problem with bragging: you set expectations so high, there is no possible way to meet them. Ten million deportations? Gone — poof! Drill, baby, drill? The oil companies have already drilled so much we’ve got more than enough oil, and he can’t add to U.S. fossil fuel production without significantly driving down the price of gas and oil and hitting his billionaire donors where it hurts: their wallets.
Trump’s inaugural address omitted one of his greatest expectations, repeated time and again on the campaign trail, that he would end the war in Ukraine before he was inaugurated. That one slipped down the memory hole without even a whisper. It’s the “why” that’s interesting and will probably yield some surprises. I think someone whispered in Trump’s ear that Putin thinks he’s a patsy, that Putin’s grand expectation is that Trump will cave to whatever he wants without protest because they’re bro-ligarchs-in-arms, or something like that. But Trump’s ego won’t stand for being cast as the guy who “lost Ukraine,” so what can he do? Well, he gave us a hint today that his answer to a lot of intractable problems is going to be to do nothing at all.
The rest of it amounted to his same old Crayola contradictions — we are the strongest nation in the world with the greatest military in history that has somehow been neutered by equity and inclusion, so nobody respects us anymore? His “America first” success is going to be measured by all the wars he doesn’t get us in, but we’re going to “expand” our territory because somebody told him we’re still “pioneers” and that means turning Greenland into the Louisiana Purchase, or something.
Who knew, except in right-wing fever swamps, that Denali needed to be re-named Mt. McKinley because President McKinley was a great businessman who loved tariffs and paid for all the great stuff Teddy Roosevelt did? If you can make sense of this whole McKinley thing, good on ya, because I sure as hell can’t.
The whole thing stank of “you can’t make this up,” because of course it was all completely made up of lies and exaggerations and the grand Trumpian tradition of me me me me me. Someone on MSNBC said the speech stood out because inaugural addresses are supposed to be about the country and what the new president is going to do for its people, but this one was, of course, about one thing and one thing only, and that is Donald Trump.
Thank God he has Air Force One again. That means he’s going to fly off to play a lot of golf. Every day that man spends golfing is a good day for America. The guys he plays golf with need H-1B visas to hire low-cost engineers to run their companies and pad their pocketsful of billions, and the golf courses where he plays need H-2B visas so they can put the gloss of legality on all the undocumented immigrants who mow the fairways and trim the Azaleas and mix the whiskey sours and grill the steaks and swab out the toilets at clubs, many of which still have restrictions on membership of Jews and Blacks and women.
That is the America Donald Trump was talking about this afternoon, the one he wants to take us back to, the America where, like the audience in the Capitol Rotunda, is safely white, coiffed and well-behaved to the point of somnambulance. It’s the America in which we will live for the next four years.
Prepare yourself. It’s going to be a long and very dull slog.
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