President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously began his first inaugural address in 1933 with the words: “This is a day of national consecration and I know that on this day my fellow Americans expect that I will address them with a candor and with a decision which the current condition of our people impels.” He did, and it must be said that in his way, unique among American presidents, President Trump did the same on Monday.
The two principal takeaways from the second Trump inauguration are, starting with the second, the apparently rather decisive victory of the Trump argument over the anti-Trump argument in what was, given the appallingly poor performance of the Biden administration in almost every policy area, the only Democratic argument of the last seven years: Trump-hate and the claim that Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy and is a criminal, indeed a convicted criminal.
The Trump counter-argument was that the 2020 election was stolen by recourse to millions of unverifiable harvested ballots that were not necessarily cast by the people whose ballots they ostensibly were, and that Trump’s opponents had perverted justice and politicized the intelligence agencies and sections of the Justice Department to harass and persecute him illegally.
The political discourse of the country plumbed depths of bitterness and defamation without parallel in the United States in living memory and in the splendid and unappealable manner of American democracy at critical times, all of these issues were evoked together to the jury of the electorate.
On Inauguration Day, the outgoing president was reduced to the preemptive pardon of uncharged members of his own family, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who had been grossly insubordinate to Mr. Trump), and the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who may have committed serious improprieties in a range of Covid matters.
In President Trump’s own inaugural address, he repeated his allegations of election-rigging and criminal abuse of the justice system, though he declined comment on his former opponent’s recourse to preemptive pardons for his entire family in the last 15 minutes of his presidency.
Undignified though it was, the conduct of the contending parties appears to provide the verdict of this great and nasty, no-holds-barred struggle for control of the apparatus of the government of the world’s most powerful nation. The guardrails of the Constitution have been strained but they have held; the people have spoken; the government is renewed and the crisis has passed.
The even stronger message of this remarkable Inauguration Day was that despite all the corruption and hypocrisy and unutterable hucksterism of the mighty torrent of garishness, dark money, and political chicanery that occurs when America elects its executive and legislative branches together, not only does the system work, but for a brief moment that moves and stirs even the most cynical denizen of the District of Columbia, the genius of renewal of the American system also still works.
The magic fusion that the authors of the Constitution of the founding documents of the United States of America managed between the full spirit of the Enlightenment and the notion of the chosen people from everywhere else in the world under the new nationality protected by almighty God himself survives.
It is a national religion of flexible rites and modes of adherence, but almost every four years and on a few other occasions, while about a quarter or even a third of Americans are virtual agnostics, almost all Americans renew their sense that their country is protected, if not by a divine intelligence, at least by providential good fortune when necessary.
Senator Klobuchar, a Democrat who was a co-coordinator of the ceremonies, behaved with exquisite non-partisan courtesy. It was an uplifting contrast with the groveling of the former Republican senate leader, Mitch McConnell, four years ago, celebrating the elevation of “our distinguished colleagues from the Senate,” President Biden and Vice President Harris.
Mr. McConnell then made no effort to conceal his glee at the defeat of his own party’s candidate, Mr. Trump. It is a great historic irony that the dubious electoral victory of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, followed by the terrible failure of their administration in inflation, the millions of illegal migrants, Afghanistan, the deranged green terror, woke and transgender nonsense, steeply rising crime, and the appeasement of America’s enemies, exposed the ghastly infirmity of the left-Democratic program, and facilitated Trump’s astounding come-back.
It challenged but did not shatter credulity when the returning president announced that it was “Liberation Day… the beginning of a new Golden Age of America,” and that “God had spared” him to lead the nation.
No fair-minded person could resent or despise the raw patriotic enthusiasm of Americans on this day. Carrie Underwood, married to a Canadian hockey player, an evangelical Christian who has been voted “the world’s sexiest vegan,” set the theme when the sound system broke down and she sang, unaccompanied, the opening verses of “America the Beautiful.”
The American system is sometimes appalling, often incongruous, frequently disappointing, but it works. The United States is the most successful country in the history of the world, it is a sovereign democracy and it can govern itself as it wishes. This is what it wishes; it isn’t the choice of all other nationalities, but it’s no legitimate concern of theirs. Trump’s right — America’s back, and the whole world is better for it.
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Publish date : 2025-01-20 20:17:00
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