Trump prepares for loftiest stage yet
Inauguration is reality TV if there ever was
Donald Trump was repeatedly said to be unfit for the presidency. There was certainly truth in that, but he is uniquely suited to being inaugurated president. A presidential inauguration is a simulacrum of a coronation, the introduction of the new president to a life marked by imperial excess the likes of which would have embarrassed Napoleon. His every movement, by airborne palace or bloated motorcade, impinges upon the liberties and massively disrupts the daily lives of his subjects. No medieval king was ever attended by such an entourage, though in recent times t he American president does seem to host amongst his retinue a higher ratio of court eunuchs, knaves and jokers.
A HEALTHY DEMOCRACY DOES NOT GLORIFY ITS HEAD OF GOVERNMENT.
I covered the inauguration of Barack Obama eight years ago. The great orator fell flat, but the day was historic, with hundreds of happy busloads of black ladies in their Sunday best — fur coats abounded in January — celebrating that moment in an enormous crowd that stretched from the capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. The grandest lady of them all, Aretha Franklin, sang My Country ‘ Tis of Thee, which, for my part, made the trip worth it.
Yet on the whole, it was rather nauseating. I would hope that most Canadians would have the same reaction. There is the endless prattle about the “peaceful transition of power,” as if it were a uniquely American capacity, with Norwegians and Taiwanese regularly resorting to violence in the streets.
For a country born in violent revolution, and given “a new birth of freedom” — as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg — in the horrific slaughter of the American Civil War, one might expect more modesty in boasting of peaceable transitions. Indeed, the greatest of all inaugural addresses — and a contender for best political speech ever delivered in the English language — was Lincoln’s second, delivered in wartime: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ‘ The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
The genius of the Westminster model of constitutional democracy is that the head of government is deprived of the ceremonial trappings which are reserved for the sovereign. A coronation every few decades means that the glorification of the state is limited. Canada, by accident of history, has even a more perfect arrangement. The sovereign is physically absent, meaning that the exaltation of the state is more diminished still, limited to occasional, and welcome, royal visits. We are not even obliged to have the palaces.
A healthy democracy does not glorify its head of government. It’s counterintuitive, but constitutional monarchies do this better than democracies shorn of their sovereigns. As we saw last week at Rideau Hall, the swearing-in of the ministry is not shabby, but it is refreshingly understated. I remember some years ago driving away from the swearing-in of one of Stephen Harper’s cabinets only to find myself, at a red light, alongside the prime minister himself in his three- car “motorcade” on his way back to the office.
As for vulgar simulacra, Donald Trump is about as perfect as it gets. His taste, like that of Saddam Hussein, runs toward ostentatious excess. And for a man who has been uniquely talented at building ever greater stages for himself over the decades, it seems just right that a stage has been built just for him on the Capitol’s west front.
Trump’s colleagues in the entertainment industry are in a deep blue funk over the elevation of one of their own to the White House, the first since Ronald Reagan. Reagan, though, had a distinguished 16 years in politics before coming to Washington; Trump is making the shift directly from television star to chief executive.
Reagan once quipped that he couldn’t understand how anybody who hadn’t been an actor could be president, given the ceremonial duties attending the head of state. In Reagan’s day, actors played roles, usually fictional characters. Trump has been playing himself in the upside- down world of reality television, in which real people do the pretending. The i nauguration is the debut of the greatest reality show of all, with Donald Trump — as always — in the starring role.