Take over the Capitol
about Irish UFC star Connor McGregor regularly pop up.
This is where those so-called ‘‘deplorables’’ – so devoid of culture they retreat to ‘‘football and mixed martial arts’’ according to Streep – were supposed to live.
Except they weren’t, at all. The people there weren’t full of hate, or intolerance. They didn’t want a wall to be built along the border with Mexico. They are embarrassed by his Twitter account, and were sincerely worried about the potential of nuclear war.
Yet they voted Trump. They needed jobs – they needed change. Last March, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton told a crowd in West Virginia ‘‘we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of work.’’
Some will watch the inauguration next week – but most won’t. They’ll be at work.
The inauguration ceremony will begin at 9.30am on January 20. Trump will sit in the same place that the likes of Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan – and Nixon – have before.
He’ll listen to two-and-a-half hours of speeches from others, before, around midday (6am Saturday, NZT), he places his hand on a Bible – Obama used Abraham Lincoln’s – and will be asked by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr to repeat the Oath of Office. Former presidents Carter, Bill Clinton and George W Bush will watch.
Trump will speak of unity and being a president for everyone. Of Making America Great Again. After all the name-calling, tweeting and hyperbole, he will finally be the President.
After attending inauguration balls, Trump will enter the West Wing, that night, as one of the most disliked presidents in history. The Post recently published a poll showing a 51 per cent unfavourablity rating.
The Women’s March on Washington will be the first organised sign of his unpopularity.
Working with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he will attempt to navigate his way through the controversial ‘repeal and replace’ of Obamacare, while managing an American intelligence community stung by his regular insults.
There’ll be controversial tweets and nonsensical arguments in defense by surrogates – while press conferences will be rare and absurd when they do happen.
Scrutiny over his finances, and connections to Russia, will be constant. Eventually, he will receive his first big test, be it a sudden economic downturn or a terrorist incident, and then history will really start to judge him.
‘For eight years,’’ acclaimed American writer TaNehisi Coates wrote in The Atlantic, ‘‘Barack Obama walked on ice – and never fell.’’
Coates was talking about race and how Obama had to carefully use his platform to address it. It’s a metaphor that could be extended to Trump, for almost every single aspect of his astonishing journey to the White House so far.
In his divisive words and actions, Trump has broken that ice. Shattered it. Sent fissures stretching out to the river’s edge of democracy – and beyond. Trump is yet to step out onto that ice, though. This time next week, he will.
Obama wasn’t the perfect president. His missteps, especially on foreign policy, are clear. Yet, as a man, Obama remained upright – and it was his dignity and calm that did it.
Trump does not possess those qualities; neither as an orator or a bloke, in general. History has shown that being president doesn’t hide a person’s personality traits; it merely exaggerates them.
As Obama said in Chicago, ‘‘reality has a way of catching up with you.’’