WHY, PRAY TELL?
As the skies darkened and the air turned dank and damp, Donald Trump stood before the world and delivered the most damning, dark and disrespectful inaugural address in history. Sure, it sounded like the Donald (now The President) was delivering a repeat of every campaign speech he’s ever given, but this time it wasn’t a campaign speech. It was the inaugural address.
The man who is now the 45th President of the United States made it clear on the day that he took the oath of office that he believes our country is a cesspool and by believing it to be so, he brings us all into the darkness.
President Trump raged about “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” ignoring the fact that this was the landscape that President Barack Obama inherited and worked eight years to obliterate.
Our new President also ignored the fact that we are no longer on the brink of total disaster, as we were when the last President was inaugurated for the first time.
Back then we were a country in which half a million jobs had disappeared, and 7 to 10 million families had lost their homes. The landscape in 2008 was one that was littered with tragedy.
President Trump promised to bring jobs back to the U.S. from overseas. That is one of the most important things he can do. But he again ignored the fact that when President Obama took office, thousands of American jobs and billions of American dollars had already gone overseas under the policies of President George W. Bush.
In short, Obama had inherited the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression, and brought us back to a country where nearly 15 million jobs have been added.
Why then can Trump only see a country shrouded in darkness, a country as dark as the skies above the Capitol as he spoke?
In perhaps the darkest moment of the speech, our newest President talked of gangs and violence as though he’d watched “Escape From New York” too many times. In truth, our country’s crime rate has declined dramatically, with a 42 percent drop in homicides, and a onethird drop in violent crimes nationwide.
In fact, New York, America’s biggest city, is now enjoying the lowest major crime rate in recorded history.
How then does Trump only see darkness, declaring, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Yes, the carnage exists — but it exists among his beloved gun owners.
How does the carnage end right here, right now, if we no longer have gun-free zones on military bases and at schools, and we have a national right to carry, with less stringent background checks for gun purchases?
In his speech, President Trump brought us all into his darkness, blaming the outgoing President for all our nation’s problems, and ungraciously failing even to acknowledge Hillary Clinton, who beat him by nearly 3 million votes.
To show his diversity, he had five members of the clergy offer prayers: five Christians and one token Jew.
As protesters of all races raged nearby, throwing bottles and rocks like a scene out of the Middle East, the new President assured the unfilled, nearly totally white crowd gathered on the National Mall, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”
Of course, immediately after Trump was sworn in, the White House website eliminated pages regarding LGBT rights, climate change, Obamacare and civil rights.
Let’s call this what it is: raging bull. The media was played like a $3 guitar again Saturday when every national TV news station covered the full National Prayer Service attended by a few hundred of Trump’s inner circle at the National Cathedral as hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of participants attended some 600 historic Women’s Marches against the Trump administration around the world. Worse, and left unsaid, was the fact that Trump packed the cathedral with a record number of evangelical faith leaders – 25 out of 30 – which played right to his base. The one rabbi who recited, Rabbi Fred Raskind, read from 1 Kings 3:12: “There has been never anyone like you before nor will anyone like you arise again.” Did Trump think he was speaking about him?