The White House has been threatened, devastated, or destroyed often – sometimes for real. In 1814, during the War of 1812, the British had occupied Washington, DC on their way for an attack on the busy port of Baltimore, further up the Chesapeake Bay. The invasion army defeated an understrength American defence force and they then proceeded to burn and loot many of the new capital’s public buildings, including the president’s residence, then called the Executive Mansion. After the war ended, the building’s walls were painted white to cover the scorch damage, thereby giving the rebuilt presidential home’s eventual official name.
Then, when Andrew Jackson won his first presidential term in 1828 as the populist candidate of the South and the West, running against the old moneyed interests of New England and the rising mercantile cities of the Northeast, a vast crowd of invited and uninvited guests crashed his inaugural bash, thoroughly trashing the White House in the process. They stole the silverware, ground masses of food into the mansion’s expensive carpets, and then walked off with bits of the furniture and pieces of the drapes as souvenirs of their visit to the seat of the nation’s power – now that it was finally in the hands of a true tribune of the people.
More contemporaneously, films like White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen have battered the White House such that the famous structure is barely left standing by the end of the final reel. Then there has been Independence Day in which an alien space ship, bringing multitudes of tentacled bug-eyed monsters into position for invasion, lasers the landmark right out of existence entirely. And then in the classic version of When the Earth Stood Still, the White House and many square miles of territory around it just barely escape total destruction by a one-robot killing machine when his alien commander finally gives Earthlings one last chance and a short grace period for our planet’s denizens to end all that nasty nuclear weapons testing – or it will be curtains for the White House and pretty much everything else.
And now there is Donald J Trump, the man who really has become the 45th president of the United States, even without a movie. Putting aside the heavy gold drapery already being hung in the Oval Office (to match that extraordinary total gold gilt look long favoured by the Trumps in their overdone Manhattan aerie), the growing Trumpian desecration of the presidency and the ignominy increasingly being heaped upon the White House symbolically may take years to recover from in the end for real. And this may be the case even if the bug-eyed monsters aren’t part of his reality television show.
Photo: US President Donald J Trump (C) speaks to members of the media before signing a confirmation for Defence Secretary James Mattis, after Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 20 January 2017. EPA/KEVIN DIETSCH / POOL
At noon on Friday, January 20, 2017, Donald Trump took the oath of office, standing before the west side of the Capitol Building, succeeding Barack Obama. In contrast to pretty much every other inaugural address given since the beginning of the republic, in his speech, Donald Trump painted a picture of a nation as a dark, dystopian place, driven down on its knees, betrayed by mendacious leaders, ravaged by its education system, defrauded by mercenary businesses, violated by foreigners and cheated by its rivals. And those were the optimistic bits.
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
After a brief attempt at magnanimity and the usual courtesies, the new president went full bore onto the disastrous state of affairs in the nation, how its leaders had systematically plundered the country, allowed its cities to collapse into wrack and ruin, the nation’s shuttered factories a raft of tombstones across the landscape, its education system close to total collapse, and the country’s elites having allowed foreign nations to suck the marrow out of the land with their craftily underpriced exported goods. And previous living presidents – all but George HW Bush in attendance right next to him – were castigated as having connived in this traitorous behaviour.
But Trump promised to drive those metaphorical moneylenders out of the temple. He was going to make the treacherous elites give back the country to the real people (who had elected him thankfully), and then force businesses to create vast millions of jobs in America, and hire and buy American. Or else.
While he was at it, as he got busy on healing the country’s near-death experience, he would rebuild the military, negotiate trade deals that no longer opened the nation’s borders without respite, and build alliances with those who would join with him to destroy ISIS. That organisation was the single most important foreign policy challenge. Period. As a result, he would personally ensure it would be utterly and completely expunged from the planet. By the time Trump’s four years are over, the Roman historian Tacitus, who had famously said of Roman conquerors, “…and where they make a desert, they call it peace”, would have had nothing on the way our Donald was going to describe his total, crushing, complete victory over ISIS. And that was about it for foreign policy.
In this crabbed vision, there was no broad sweep of history carrying the nation along, no references to the country’s proud political traditions, nor any soaring phrases that could stir the emotions and lift the spirits of a divided nation. Realistically, how could he offer any such words, if the country was as close to the collapse as he had painted it? He was the only man with a finger in the leaking dike and it was just in time.
Well, Franklin Roosevelt had helped bring together a shattered nation with his first inaugural address in the midst of the Great Depression, Abraham Lincoln had gamely offered words to heal a nation that had been in a horrific civil war for four years, and Barack Obama had spoken to rally a shocked nation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, so there clearly were numerous models he could have chosen as sources of inspiration in times of trouble. But Donald Trump chose to highlight blame for the disasters he described, and, in his speech, he chose a distillation of his angriest, most charged campaign rhetoric to the national and international audiences.
For this moment, a relatively modest crowd of perhaps a quarter of a million-plus people had gathered to watch this ceremony, even as small groups of demonstrators around the city were engaged in running skirmishes with police and occasional outbursts of violence.
After President Trump’s speech, several hundred invited guests were ushered into the Capitol Rotunda for the customary lunch. Surprise, surprise, there was the new president breaking bread with some of the very elite he had just railed against, such as uber-financial supporter of right-wing conservative causes, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, in addition to most of the very political leadership he had excoriated as well. (It should also be noted that around 60 Democratic congressmen and women decided to boycott the entire proceedings, following Trump’s dust-up with Congressman John Lewis a few days earlier.)
And then it was on to the victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue as the former president and his spouse – now private citizens – were carried by helicopter to Joint Base Andrews in the Maryland suburbs in order to fly off for a short vacation in California. The whole inauguration had seemed curiously devoid of energy and spirit for many people.
But there was still much more ahead for this first weekend. Saturday morning, at an interfaith prayer service at the National Cathedral with the new president and vice president in attendance, various spiritual leaders offered their hopes and benedictions, including an imam – who spoke beyond his pre-selected text – reading words that called for a love of and an appreciation of diversity. Meanwhile, a rabbi chanted the statement of faith that is the “Shema” prayer, words that have, historically, been recited in extremis when members of Jewish communities have faced grave danger. One wonders how the new president felt about these themes and the other spiritual messages that had called for divine guidance, wisdom, and humility by the nation’s leaders.
The president and vice president were then off to the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters for a hastily scheduled public appearance designed to mend fences with these folks, given Trump’s harsh words about their role in the report about the Russian hacking and other interventions in the recent election. What was supposed to have been a kiss-kiss, all-is-forgiven session soon turned into another of those bizarre, disorienting stream-of-consciousness appearances by the new president. After a moment or two saluting the bravery and professionalism of his CIA audience, dragooned into the office on a weekend, it was off to the races with, among other rants, Trump chastising the evil, false-news-creating-media for its incitement of that made-up dust-up between the CIA and the president-elect, as well as the false narrative of the mediocre attendance at his inaugural. Then there were even more curious digressions, including how he is an extremely smart man, a real intellectual, by virtue of the fact that he had an uncle in the academic business. Really. And all of this happened on national and international television, live.