The
Guardian view on Donald Trump’s inauguration: a declaration of
political war
Editorial
The
presidential handover observed all the usual civilities, but the tone
of Trump’s speech marked a frightening change in America
Friday 20 January
2017 19.04 GMT
In its outward
details, the orderly transfer of American presidential power
accomplished in the inauguration-day scene on Capitol Hill today felt
time-honoured. The ceremonial essentials of the occasion – the
stars and stripes banners, the dignitaries and the prescribed rituals
of the swearings-in – were familiar and traditional. Political
rivals took their places on the podium as they do every four years,
shook hands and applauded one another, offering gracious compliments
and providing a show of national dignity.
Yet all this was in
fact a sham. Donald Trump’s inaugural address was a declaration of
war on everything represented by these choreographed civilities.
President Trump – it’s time to begin to get used to those
jarringly ill-fitting words – did not conjure a deathless phrase
for the day. His words will not lodge in the brain in any of the
various uplifting ways that the likes of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy
or Reagan once achieved. But the new president’s message could not
have been clearer. He came to shatter the veneer of unity and
continuity represented by the peaceful handover. And he may have
succeeded. In 1933, Roosevelt challenged the world to overcome fear.
In 2017, Mr Trump told the world to be very afraid.
Mr Trump’s speech
was by turns bitter, blowhard and banal. It boiled with resentment
and contempt for politics, and the checks and balances of the US
system. It was aimed at those who voted for him, not at those, the
majority, who did not. It said barely a word about race. Its America
First nationalism was crude and shameless. The speech seethed with
scorn for everything about the capital city that he now seeks to bend
to his will. It was, though, almost wholly empty of detail or of
clarity about how its goals would be achieved. Even before he opened
his mouth, Washington was on edge about what a Trump presidency might
mean and the world was on edge about what is happening to America.
Everything Mr Trump said confirmed that those instincts were correct.
Presidents have often come into office promising to take the nation
on a new path. But if Mr Trump can be believed, his election and his
speech signal the biggest shake-up in Washington in living memory.
The vital question
for the future is whether Mr Trump can be believed. In his speech he
mocked those who have been all talk and no action. But there is a
risk he could be a victim of that too. He raised the bar for his own
presidency to a very high level by insisting that everything would
change “right here, right now”. But will it? The power of the
presidency has grown over the decades, and the 2016 election has now
put the Republicans in charge of all the arms of government. But Mr
Trump is not, at least not yet, a dictator. He has to govern with a
Congress that does not share all his priorities – in some cases, Mr
Trump’s priorities may even be preferable – and according to law
that is interpreted by the courts. The states have a lot of power to
defy him, as California seems determined to do in the case of the
planned wall with Mexico.
It has been argued
that voters chose Mr Trump knowing that he would challenge the
system, but confident that the system would protect the voters from
the worst consequences. That may prove right. But Mr Trump should not
be underestimated. He is a proud disrupter not a diffident
conformist. He is – and intends to be – different from the
presidents of the past: in his personality, his working style, his
ways of communicating and, most important of all, in his political
aims. Those who support him and those who fear him are agreed on
that. Yet he has arrived in the White House with low ratings and amid
a deep sense of division. His inauguration was boycotted by several
leaders and will be protested against by tens of thousands. His
attempts to overturn America’s political hierarchy and culture will
enthuse some – the stock market is thrumming – but terrify
others.
The realities of Mr
Trump’s disruptive intentions will be revealed in the weeks and
months ahead. The first downpayments on his turbulent agenda can be
found on the White House website. Domestically, the biggest programme
will be the infrastructure projects that formed the only detailed
pledge of the inaugural address. Beyond America’s shores, much is
still guesswork: the probable clash with China poses the biggest
threat of all; whether Mr Trump gets his way on Russia may depend on
his more sceptical cabinet.
“The time for
empty talk is over,” said President Trump today. “Now arrives the
hour of action.” At home and abroad, and in the light of today’s
speech, that is a truly terrifying prospect.
'American
carnage': Trump's vision casts shadow over day of pageantry
In
Donald Trump’s first speech as US president, he offered a sinister
view of the US: cities afflicted by crime, political elite in control
and closed-down factories
Ed Pilkington in
Washington
@edpilkington
Friday 20 January
2017 19.07 GMT
At the stroke of
noon, as is the American way, power passed from one man to another
man. And with that passing of the baton from Barack Obama to Donald
Trump, made manifest in a 35-word oath, the country was changed
beyond recognition as the new president offered a dark vision of his
nation and the world.
The new 45th
president of the United States coined the sinister phrase “American
carnage” to vividly conjure an image of inner cities he said were
afflicted by crime, a political elite that had forgotten ordinary
people, and a landscape of rusted factories like tombstones.
And with Hillary
Clinton watching only a few painful feet away, Trump left no one in
any doubt that he intends to unleash what he called a new vision of
“America first” on the world, delivering a brutal and unrepentant
speech that made little attempt to soothe the world or begin the
healing of an agitated and anxious nation.
Trump delivered a
16-minute inaugural speech that more closely resembled his thunderous
addresses from the campaign trail than the oratorical heights of his
predecessors, berating the Washington elites of both parties for
ignoring the American people and allowing inner cities to fester in
“crime and gangs and drugs”.
“The American
carnage stops right here, right now,” he said. “From this day
forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward,
it’s going to be only America first. America first.”
As Trump uttered the
first sentence of his address, the slate-grey sky over the Capitol
building opened up and it began to rain, pouring over the head of the
incoming president and, just a few rows away, those of Clinton and
her husband Bill. Having won almost 3 million more votes than her
opponent, but gone on to lose in the electoral college, the defeated
Democratic candidate listened silently as her vanquisher described a
future for America that was entirely antithetical to her own.
“Together we will
make America strong again, wealthy again, proud again, safe again
and, yes, together we will make America great again,” Trump
promised, his words prompting a wave of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants
from a sea of red caps that stretched back to the Washington Memorial
– although white tarpaulins protecting the grass of National Mall
revealed vast gaps in the crowd.
It was a peaceful
transition of power, but hardly harmonious. With protesters already
descending on the capital in droves for Saturday’s Women’s March
on Washington, which is expected to comfortably outsize Trump’s
inaugural crowd, there were signs all over the city of the open
gashes of a vicious and divisive election battle.
Long before dawn,
protesters carrying placards saying “fight fascism”, “not my
president”, “no Trump, no KKK, no racists, go away” were
fanning through the largely deserted streets. There were tussles with
police in riot gear as groups tried to block the entrances to the
Capitol grounds, while some protesters managed to pass security and
themselves gain entry; one woman dressed in pink shouting “Stop GOP
war” reached the front of the tier directly below the new president
before being escorted out.
As the inaugural
ceremony was under way, police deployed pepper spray after a group of
protesters from the anarchist group black bloc, smashed store and car
windows.
The proceedings are
called a transition, but “transformation” better conveys the
significance of the day: a nation transformed, as power slid from an
individual known for his calm, professorial demeanor to a man who
says he doesn’t have time to read but does have seemingly endless
capacity to shoot 140-character bullets at his enemies.
America’s first
black president metamorphosed into America’s first reality TV
president. “Yes we can!” gave way to “Make America Great
Again!” as Trump was inducted into power on the West Front of the
Capitol.
On one level, there
was so much about the day that was familiar, filled with the
comforting filigrees of a ceremony that has taken place every four
years since George Washington’s first inauguration on 30 April
1789. It began with a church service at St John, Trump stepping out
in his standard uniform of navy suit and red tie; his wife, Melania,
in a powder blue suit with unmistakable echoes of Jackie Kennedy.
As Trump’s
entourage were leaving church, Obama was filmed through the glass
door of the Oval Office as he completed his final act, leaving a
letter of welcome for his successor – as a workman up a ladder made
final preparations for the arrival of Trump 45.
After church it was
coffee at the White House with the outgoing Obamas, then the shared
ride to Capitol Hill, and the portentous swearing-in, replete with
ruffles and flourishes on drum and bugle, Hail to the Chief and the
21-gun salute.
The solemnity of the
occasion was later to be leavened with the inaugural parade back to
the White House and three evening balls attended by the Trumps, a
pared-down display of revelry compared with the Obamas’ 10 in 2009
as a sign, aides said, of the new president’s determination to get
down to business.
Trump took the oath
of office with his left hand resting on two Bibles held by his wife –
his own bedside volume and a second more historic edition. That was
the Bible used in 1861 at the first inauguration of a president who
knew a thing or two about national disunity, Abraham Lincoln. It also
marked a rare note of continuity between Trump and his predecessor,
Obama having used the same Bible in both his inaugurations.
In his speech, short
by the standards of past inaugurations but lacking nothing in terms
of ominous punch, Trump attempted to set up his electoral victory in
grandiose terms. It was the product of a movement “like none ever
seen in the world”, he said, that would return power from the
self-interested politicians to the American people.
“For too long, a
small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the benefits while
the people bore the costs. Politicians prospered but the jobs left
and the factories closed,” he said.
He painted a picture
of a devastated country he had inherited, full of mothers and
children trapped in poverty in the inner cities and “rusted-out
factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our
nation”.
He paid lip-service
to those who have criticized him for emboldening racism and white
supremacy on his journey to the White House, but only in the thinnest
terms, expressing a call for diversity through the prism of
nationalism. “When you open your heart to patriotism there is no
room for prejudice,” he said.
“A new national
pride will heal our division. It’s time to remember that whether we
are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of
patriots.”
At the end of his
speech, Trump stood behind bulletproof glass beside the podium, right
arm punching the air as he finally claimed the spoils of his
world-turning victory. Then attention momentarily veered back to
Obama, by now a common citizen, having been stripped of his aura at
noon in the manner of Cinderella at midnight.
He and his family
made their way to the East Front of the Capitol, where a Marine Corps
helicopter awaited them. As they were whisked off to Andrews air
force base en route for the California resort of Palm Springs – a
suitably soothing destination in which to begin recovery after eight
draining years in the White House – Obama’s America receded into
the distance.
Transitions in times
past have not always been easy, or friendly. The 1829 handover from
John Quincy Adams to Andrew Jackson, that of Herbert Hoover to
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower were all
marked by animosities.
But rarely has the
lurch from one president to the next been so wrenching, or come at
the end of a presidential campaign and transition in which the
incoming president had willfully insulted so many. Trump’s
historically low approval ratings even before he begins the job are
just one indication of the discontent harbored by those he has
alienated.
Among them are
individuals like John Lewis, the civil rights hero of Selma,
denounced in a tweet for his “talk, talk, talk”, and the
“overrated” Meryl Streep. Also among the abused and disaffected
are entire communities and categories of Americans: Muslims who Trump
proposed to ban, Hispanics whose undocumented brethren he threatened
to deport en masse, intelligence chiefs likened to Nazis, women
demeaned by fat-shaming and sexual bragging.
The day was defined
as much by those who chose to absent themselves from the inauguration
as those in attendance. At least 60 House Democrats, Lewis among
them, boycotted the event. A slew of celebrities also kept away, an
awkward inconvenience for Trump given that he made so much during the
campaign of his own celebrity status as former host of The
Apprentice.
Also absent was
Vladimir Putin, though the Russian president was very much there in
spirit, hovering over the Capitol building. The full extent of the
Kremlin’s meddling in the US election is not, and may never be,
known; what is certain is that all main US players, Trump included,
now agree that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic emails
during the election, to which one might add that from Putin’s
perspective, he got his man.
While the injured
nursed their wounds, it remained Trump’s day. Hundreds of thousands
of his supporters poured into Washington from all over the US, partly
to savor this moment of history and partly to celebrate that the
country was theirs again.
Many of the
Trumpistas were making their first visit to the nation’s capital.
“With the help of our new president, to remind the world why
America was great to begin with,” said Jimmy Kirby, 46, an
electrician from Nashville, Tennessee, who had driven 11 hours to
have his first taste of the city.
Another newcomer,
Jeff Krotz, 49, from Buffalo, New York, used edgier language. A
military veteran, he said: “Nobody respects us. There’s no God in
the country any more, and the way I see it if you don’t like the
way we do things here you can go somewhere else.”
Shirts proclaiming
“Proud member of the basket of deplorables” were peppered through
the crowd, as were those demanding “Hillary for prison 2016”.
Others had an even more malevolent ring, with one man sporting a
T-shirt that said: “The witch is dead”.
“This is the mood
of the world,” said Richard Pease, 53, a printing sales executive
from New Hampshire. “You just watch: first Brexit, then Trump, next
Marine Le Pen for France. People want their lives back.”
Asked to elaborate,
Pease said: “I’m a white male who owns firearms. At least for the
next four years I get to keep my guns and my balls.”
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