Grump Trump gets the hump on day one, as hosilities abound
THAT GURNING face. That smug smile that turns in on itself. The self-deifying soundbites. Trump arrived into the White House from Capitol Hill on Friday on a cloud of bluster, fantasy and controversy.
Within hours he had declared war on the media through his White House press secretary Sean Spicer, amid childish and pompous claims that his crowd was bigger than Obama’s. He is, to my mind, a latter day Walter Mitty. Scratch beneath the orange surface and what is there. Lies, lies and more damned lies.
Contrast the image of Barack Obama taking the oath of office in 2009, when the National Mall was full of millions of people, many singing and with tears of joy in their eyes, to the scenes on Friday and the word underwhelming comes to mind.
Trump’s inauguration alongside his precedecesor, Barack Obama, who tried too hard to be liked some times, but who ultimately did a great job in leading by good example healing divides at home and abroad, was a portend of what is to come.
He talked of America First, waiting for people to start chanting the slogan, but it got a lukewarm response. The USA USA chants were in abundance though, from the baying Trump crowd. He spoke about the need for unity with Americans who live with ‘the crime and the gangs and the drugs’, rich words from a man whose father was investigated for preventing black people from staying at his apartments and who, himself, called Mexican immigrants rapists on his campaign trail.
His is a wasteland America, full of ‘carnage’ and ‘tombstones’ of factories where, he would have it, people have been neglected by successive governments.
The 45th American President wants to make America great again, saying the country will ‘shine for everyone to follow’. Positing himself as the businessman who can bring jobs to the country, as a Defender of the People, Trump seems to be so deluded to think a man who is the epitomy of entitlement and Daddy’s money will devote his time to transforming the lives of people he patently has no interest in.
It emerged afterwards that most of his inauguration speech was not written by him - as he suggested in a tweet - but by two of his top advisors.
Two days before his inauguration, The Donald tweeted a picture of him seemingly writing his speech three weeks before at the Winter White House in Mar-a-Lago. However, a White House official said much of the speech was actually written by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile anyone with eyes in their head can see that photographs of the National Mall in Washington DC and public transport figures for the city contradict Spicer’s manic war cry that his boss drew ‘the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe’.
See Trump can’t taking losing and he hates criticism. Like a spoiled child he goes into Grump Trump mode when confronted, usually leading to a late night defensive tweet. Spicer accused journalists of reporting inaccurate crowd numbers and using misrepresentative photographs ‘to minimise the enormous support’ that he claimed the new president enjoyed at his swearing-in.
Size matters for Trump and if can he pull off the unlikely and get employment figures up to a size the press is satsified with, happy days. But the crowds of protestors will not go away and Obama’s already missed.