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President, Trump: Something Wicked This Way Comes

President, Trump: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Donald Trump’s first weekend already seems to have set the pace for an extraordinary and unsettling presidency, especially as popular opposition to his presidency has sprung up across the nation. J. BROOKS SPECTOR tries to take the initial measure of it all.

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.

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.

But while Donald Trump was doing whatever that was, there was a yet more consequential event playing out across the nation – and around the world. Well over a million, perhaps two million or still more, people – mostly, but not solely, women – came together in extraordinary mass demonstrations in Washington, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, London, Paris and so many other cities globally – to protest deep misgivings over the new president’s public misogyny, his intentions to defund Planned Parenthood, his plans on immigration, and a whole litany of other issues. The Washington march alone brought together many more people than had the actual presidential inauguration. And the various marches had drawn in some real star power speakers – in an obvious and embarrassing contrast to the C-list entertainers who had populated the pre-inaugural concert on the 19th for the incoming president.

Photo: Thousands of people on Pennsylvania Avenue participate in the Women’s March and rally to protest President Donald J Trump the day after he was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, in Washington, DC, USA, 21 January 2017. Protest rallies were held in over 30 countries around the world in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington in defence of press freedom, women’s and human rights following the official inauguration on 20 January of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America in Washington, USA. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS

Attendees at the Washington march told us afterwards that it had been a gloriously good-natured, disorganised and chaotic affair, but that – just possibly – it heralded a chance for those who opposed the new president’s principles to express their disgust and to begin to set things in motion for a future opposition to him. Marches do wonderful things for the soul, but, as speakers like Senator Elizabeth Warren had said at the Boston version of the march, the real task is to build an opposition that will take back so many of the political offices now held by Trump-supporting GOP legislators and other elected officials to reorient the nation’s policies and heading.

That, of course, is the real nub of things for anyone actually interested in halting or reversing Trumpian policymaking. Democrats are now badly outgunned in the Congress, in state legislatures and among governorships – not to mention in the White House, of course. Still, the 2018 mid-term election is now less than two years away, and some are already talking about adopting the Tea Party’s strategy of organising locally to affect things nationally and thereby to target vulnerable Republican legislators wherever they are.

By nightfall, the new president’s press spokesman, Sean Spicer, had held a briefing to decry the false news that the inauguration crowd had been far smaller than Saturday’s march. In this he tangled with crowd estimates from the Washington, DC government, various media houses, and even crowd measurement experts, insisting the media was at it again with their never-tiring efforts to denigrate the new president. Risible as this effort was, the new presidential counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, then told NBC News that Spicer had simply been using “alternative facts” to bolster his defence of the president. Right, we’ve got it. “Alt-right presidency relies on alt-facts” will be a locution with real staying power.

Internationally, the Trump message has been understood as a roll-back from the 70-year consensus of an America that had led the West in stabilising Europe, created a post-World War II, global financial structure, encouraged an increasingly open, free-trading global economy and that (albeit with some hiccups and deviations) supported the growth of democratic institutions globally. As Frank-Walter Steinmeier, German minister of foreign affairs, observed, “With the election of #Trump, the old world of the 20th century is gone. What the world of 2morrow will look like is yet unclear.” Or, as South Africa’s Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, freshly back from the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, had put it to this writer directly, it was astonishing to see how the leadership, defence and advocacy of the strength and benefits of an open, globalised world economy has now firmly passed to – astonishingly – Xi Jinping’s China, in place of America, based on Xi’s forceful keynote speech in Davos. Ouch.

But what to make of the ideas behind a Trump presidency? It is too easy to call him – as some opponents on the left are already doing – a fascist and an imperialist. For the latter, as his inaugural address had firmly explained, save for the crusade to destroy ISIS and to find whatever allies and whoever will help him carry out this divine mission, the impetus of the president (even if not some of his senior cabinet officials) is to pull back from engagement with the world and carry out a thoroughly transactional negotiations stance on trade matters. It will be the art of the deal writ large in any trade negotiations. That seems almost the antithesis of imperialism.

For the other charge, that he is a lightly disguised fascist, it seems to us that it is much more accurate to depict him as a kind of wannabe-Caesar, bullying the Senate into supporting and financing his plans, and deriding his opponents and delegitimising them in the eyes of the public – and, most especially, in the sight of his Trumpenproletariat supporters, the people who had brought him to power.

British classicist Daisy Dunn has argued recently that Trump (and America more generally) might well draw some important political lessons from imperial Rome’s struggles with power and the ways America’s own founding generation had wrestled with this problem. As she has written,

For the founding fathers, Roman history offered an important guide to modern life. The year 1776 marked not only the Declaration of Independence but also the publication of the first volume of Gibbon’s history. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton – the 18th-century equivalents of Cicero, Cincinnatus and Publius – immersed themselves in the politics of the res publica. The founding fathers’ Roman alter egos reflected their admiration for men who fought to preserve an equilibrium of power. Just as the Romans had overturned their monarchs and built a republic, so the Americans could now liberate themselves to establish ‘a government by its citizens in mass’. By heeding the lessons of the past, they could safeguard their republic from demagoguery and collapse – or so they believed.”

America’s founders were also well aware of Plato’s fears that an oligarchy could easily slide past a more democratic system and move onto the downward slope towards mobocracy at the behest of and in support of a man on horseback.

Dunn has gone on to say,

While the election of a demagogue such as Trump feels like a blow to the long-held ideal of the republic, it is also a reminder that a republic is rarely anything other than an ideal. The balance of power between senators and tribunes in the republic of ancient Rome proved impossible to sustain. There were republican senators who behaved like emperors and later there were emperors who maintained the pretence of living in a republic. Demagogues often arose not from the lower classes but from the wealthy, aristocratic elites they proposed to reject….

Analogies between Trump and the demagogues and emperors of ancient Rome come only too easily. It is, however, fruitless to despair at the death of the republic or the birth of Caligula II. America’s fall, if it comes, will be protracted and complex. If the pattern of Roman history can show Trump one thing, it is that he would be wise to look not only at the troubles brewing without but also at those brewing within.”

In truth, the American republic – as the women’s marches may well have demonstrated – still has within it the power to resist such overt power grabs, but it will require a summoning of public will to counter excesses and to show the new administration its authority is neither unlimited nor all-encompassing. Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the country’s citizens, when asked what kind of government the constitutional convention had just created in 1787, was that it was a republic – if they could keep it. Perhaps the pendulum is already about to swing back, only a few days after the extraordinary events of this past week. Clearly much more to come. DM

Main photo: US President Donald J Trump and First Lady Melania Trump walk in their inaugural parade after being sworn in as the 45th President in Washington, DC, USA, 20 January 2017. Trump won the 08 November 2016 election to become the next US President. EPA/KEVIN DIETSCH / POOL

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