Trump’s message: Make America small
A ll through the day there had been a determined, almost hysterical attempt to invest the proceedings with a sense of normalcy, as if there were anything normal about any of it. The networks gushed on about the symbolism of the event, “the peaceful transfer of power” and all that, as if the absence of tanks in the streets were now the benchmark of usualness.
The Obamas looked grimly cheery, Barack shaking hands with Donald Trump as if the latter had not spent years trying to delegitimize his presidency, Michelle embracing Melania as if she had not plagiarized her speech.
And everyone carried on as if Trump were just another incoming president: as if were not the most unqualified, unfit, unpopular candidate ever to attain the office; as if he had not told hundreds of lies along the way and insulted hundreds of people and played to every prejudice he could find; as if he had not, by his own admission, sexually molested any number of women, only a dozen of whom came forward during the campaign; as if he and his associates were not suspected of con- spiring with Vladimir Putin to twist the election; as if he were not in multiple conflicts of interest the minute he took office owing to his refusal to divest his vast international holdings; as if anyone knew what other conflicts he might have owing to his refusal to release his tax returns; as if British bookmakers were not giving even odds on his being impeached.
Still, by the time all the dignitaries had been introduced and the oath of office had been administered, it was possible to forget all that for a moment: to forget that he had lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes; to forget that the powers that were about to be peacefully transferred were powers almost certain to be abused. For there were all those former presidents, and Congressional leaders of both parties, and Supreme Court justices, and the people spread out in front, and surely this was just like every previous inauguration, even if he were unlike every previous president.
But then he began to speak.
From the opening line it was jarring: surely the most uncompromisingly harsh, bitter, accusatory inaugural speech in American history. Gone was the soaring, inspirational rhetoric of speeches past. In its place was a catalogue of the enemies who had betrayed America and its people, the “small group in our nation’s capital” who had flourished at the public’s expense, the politicians who had “defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” the foreigners who were “making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”
Characteristically, most of it was a lie. You would never know from Trump’s invocation of “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones” that he was inheriting the strongest economy of any incoming president in the last 30 years, with the economy growing at an annualized rate of 3.5 per cent, unemployment at 4.7 per cent, and middle class incomes rising at the fastest pace in decades.
Likewise for much of the rest of his unrelentingly dark portrait: the “carnage” of “the crime and the gangs and the drugs” (though murder rates have jumped in some large American cities in the last two years, the overall violent crime rate is lower than at any time since 1970) or the “sad depletion of our military” (American military spending dwarfs that of all of its nearest rivals combined).
Even more discordant was the response he invited from his audience. Addressing the American public in the depths of the Depression, Roosevelt jauntily chided them that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Trump despairs that “we’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.” With the Civil War drawing to a close, Lincoln promised to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Trump seethes at foreigners and unnamed Washington insiders, under whose baleful rule “the wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.” For all the speech’s appeals to “unity,” it was only the unity of Us against Them.
If there was any clear direction signalled, it was inward. Nakedly protectionist, stridently isolationist, it sounded a wholesale retreat from American leadership, if not the world. Kennedy’s inaugural committed his nation to “pay any price, bear any burden” to assure “the survival and success of liberty.” Trump vows to bear no burden and ensure that others pay any price, pledging at all times and in all ways to put “America first” and “only America first.”
Of course in one sense Trump is perfectly correct: it is indeed “the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” It is the notion that withdrawing into itself (“we must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries” was one of the more paranoid passages) is the way to serve America’s interests that is all wrong.
Trump is the first president in memory to state categorically that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” But protecting industry from competition doesn’t put America first, so much as it puts some Americans ahead of other Americans: the consumers who will have to pay the inflated prices that result, the other industries whose sales will suffer accordingly, the workers they will not hire, and so on.
Americans will not be made richer by overcharging one another. Neither will America be made greater by shrinking from the world, or hiding behind walls, literal or figurative.