Trump’s darkness at noon: Divisive inaugural bodes ill
Ruth Marcus
This will be the presidency of the raised fist, not the outstretched hand.
Inaugural addresses are traditionally occasions of inclusion and healing. In that transformative moment, the new president sheds a partisan identity and assumes the mantle of national leader, president of and for all the people. If any new president should have sounded that soothing note, it was President Donald Trump. If any nation needed to hear it, it was America on Jan. 20.
The state of our union is dangerously frayed. The country is in a volatile and fragile condition that requires attending to, not ignoring. Millions more citizens voted against the new president than for him, and the reports since Election Day about Russia have served only to deepen those anxieties. The 45th president takes office with less popular support than any president in the history of polling.
Americans want instinctively to rally around their president, no matter how hard-fought the preceding campaign. Trump squandered that reflexive national goodwill with his peevish, provocative transition. He similarly squandered the inaugural with a speech singularly lacking in grace, one that will be widely noted and long remembered for its darkness. That he bracketed the address with clenchedfist salutes perfectly signaled the pugnacious presidency to come.
In the early morning hours following his victory, Trump, echoing Lincoln, vowed to “bind the wounds of division.” That was a welcome, hopeful sign, but a fleeting one, erased by angry tweets and extreme appointments.
On Friday, Trump placed his hand on the 16th president’s Bible, but there was no Lincoln in his message.
Instead, Trump sank to the occasion. Rising above is not in his skill set, as badly as the nation needs it.
The absence even of ritual incantation was both telling and alarming. Invocations to unity have been a staple of inaugurals for centuries. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson said after the bitter election of 1800. “Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment; it is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos,” George W. Bush, taking office after a bruising recount, told the nation in 2001.
Such healing language from Trump was necessary but would not have been sufficient. Now Trump has served notice: He will not even make the rhetorical feint.
The worry, the dread, that so many Americans feel in contemplating Trump’s presidency, the ugly feelings stirred up by his us-versus-them campaign, the degree to which Trump has continued to provoke and incite even after his victory — all of these counseled some recognition of the reality of the national rift.
This is Trump’s greatest test and his most glaring blind spot. He does not want to accept his role in helping create this era of bad feelings, nor his responsibility for trying to cure it.
Trump’s pivot — to maturity, to behaving like a normal politician/candidate/ president — is doomed to be eternally elusive. Republicans awaited this transformation after he became the party’s nominee; the country craved it during the transition. In the course of the campaign, Trump repeatedly assured us that he knows how to be presidential. But there has been no evidence that he can pull it off, and little hope, after this least gracious of beginnings, that he even intends to try.