By Palladium
United States president Donald Trump is used to being insulted. But luckily for him, not only has he developed a thick skin against insults, he has also become proficient in hurling invectives. His inaugural address last Monday was an example of how inaugural addresses should never be written. The speech was most remarkable for its repudiation of America’s global leadership. In his first term, he enunciated that repudiation and attempted to execute it. But Americans and the rest of the world were so shocked by that seismic redirection that they attempted a pushback. That pushback led by President Joe Biden lasted for four years, and enjoyed only partial success. Now, as Mr Trump doubles down on his first term policies in his inauguration address, that audacious and provocative policy of isolationism will now be reinforced to the hilt.
If a million commentaries were written on Mr Trump’s inauguration speech, it would clearly still not be enough. He treaded on many old grounds and beliefs, and casually broke new ones. He barely acknowledged his predecessors, who silently endured the ordeal of listening to his long and dreary speech, and largely ignored their contributions to America’s greatness. And, with all the grandiloquence and foulness he could muster, he deprecated their presidencies and insulted their persons. The speech was all about him, his deep sense of insecurity, his messianism, his superficialities, and lack of historical perspective. It mimicked and is suffused by his colloquialisms, and it lacks any iota of inspiration in language and style as well as in substance and reality. The speech chased shadows, or was chased by shadows. It was not just unworthy of being called a speech, let alone an inauguration address, it was also provocatively bad in every detail.
No single paragraph holds redemptive value. Four of his predecessors sat grimly and listlessly through the thoroughly vexatious speech, hoping that every next paragraph would ameliorate the badness of the preceding paragraph. But every next statement is worse than the previous, until finally the ordeal comes to an end in a string of hubristic attestation of American strength and boasting that seems eerily apocalyptic. In the very second paragraph of the address, President Trump begins needling his predecessors, insinuating that they wasted opportunities and that America got worse under them. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first. Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the Justice Department and our government will end. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free. America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.”
Put simply, to Mr Trump, he is the all-American icon: resplendent, transcendental and unparalleled. He thinks his first four years unequalled; now he is convinced the next four years will set him above George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or all of them put together, as he makes America ‘far more exceptional than ever before’. The phrase ‘than ever before’ will go on to be the leitmotif of his address, and probably his presidency. He is not just a narcissist, he is also delusional and megalomaniacal. Hear him: “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250 year history, and I’ve learned a lot along the way. The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one, that I can tell you.” He thinks he was challenged more than President Washington (War of Independence), Lincoln (American civil war, Emancipation Act) and President Roosevelt (World War II). The mere hint of that megalomania is not just fiendish, it is also inflammatory.
In the sixth paragraph, there is no let up on his boasting. It seems muted at first, but it soon soars to crazy and unpalatable heights as he rechristens his inauguration. Says he: “For American citizens, January 20th, 2025 is Liberation Day. It is my hope that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” It takes excess of stupidity and sycophancy to contemplate that Mr Trump’s election ‘is the greatest and most consequential ever’. The statement is remarkable for what it has not said openly, that the election, in his deluded mind, is all about reclaiming the country for white America. All other gestures to all religions, race and gender are mere tokenism.
Now to his aggressive agenda borne out of his eclecticism. “As Commander in Chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions and that is exactly what I am going to do. We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” Everything about his programme, in line with his insecurities, must simply be compared with those of his predecessors, or they were not worthy or grand enough. Everything is about upturning other leaders’ legacies. It is a miracle that President Biden walked out of the Capitol Rotunda unaided at the end of the inauguration, given how Mr Trump savaged him and his policies, so gracelessly, so peevishly, and so populist. His supporters hailed him, validating the description Hillary Clinton gave them as the deplorables. He would end the Green New Deal and…revoke the electric vehicle mandate, “saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers. In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice. We will build automobiles in America again at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago.” While the world is marching furiously ahead with new technologies, under President Trump, America would march furiously backwards repudiating clean energy, climate change ameliorations, and electric vehicle. Four years of marching backwards will ineluctably cost America dozens of years in the future.
And then there were a number of non sequiturs in Mr Trump’s address, ideas and inchoate policies so befuddling that only a warped and uneducated mind could contemplate them. Hear him: “I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” He presumes that there will be no retaliations, or that the countries at the receiving end of his tariffs and taxes will roll over and die. In his first term, he had limited success in that sector; now he plans to revive and strengthen suspect policies. They will, of course, end up being counterproductive; and will injure American interests far beyond what he hopes to gain in the short run.
And still on his chimerical pursuit of American greatness, he exhales: “Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” But they already have the strongest military. Perhaps he sees the Abraham Accords that seeks a rapprochement between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain as the pivot on which to build a great foreign policy. Well, it took a few bombings by Iranian Middle East proxies, chiefly Hamas, to torpedo the agreement. Mr Trump trivialises the dynamics of international politics; he will come to grief sooner than he thinks, for rather than be bullied, the rest of the world will ignore, scoff at and ridicule his naivety.
He will rename the Gulf of Mexico, he thunders, and take the Panama Canal back. Beyond the revisionism at play, Mr Trump has become a regular Rip van Winkle. But the world has changed in ways which old-fashioned, gung-ho American policies can never reverse. He disdains his neighbours, Mexico and Canada, and taunts and affronts them, and boastfully swears that he could end the Russo-Ukrainian War in one day. He tried similar tricks in his first term, even lobbying and romancing dictatorships; but he came to grief. He will soon find out how hard it is to pacify the world. The danger, however, is that once the world moves beyond America’s renascent isolationism, there will be no going back, and it might very well sound the death knell of the American Empire, or at least the beginning of the end.
It was tough for President Biden to endure Mr Trump’s harangue, but the old warhorse bore the childish vituperations of his successor with fortitude. Mrs Clinton repeatedly blanched with horror during the speech, and President George W. Bush winced now and again. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama kept an expressionless face. They must all be genuinely petrified that America, the America dozens of great US presidents built on the foundations of a great and incomparable constitution, stands the risk of being irreparably and irreversibly damaged by a churlish, dysfunctional and self-centred president who, in another clime, could never have risen to the presidency. There is something about democracy that is inherently good and contradistinctively evil, inspiring and depressing at the same time. Mr Trump exemplifies the latter without giving any hint of the possibility of engendering the former. Incredibly, he speaks of the beginning of America’s golden age, but not his contrasting lack of competence and capacity, nor of the deep and countervailing fissures of American society. There was nothing uplifting or soaring about his speech, except coarseness, bullying, street language and religious pettiness. No empire lasts forever, as Rule Britannia attested to in the last century, and no great power retains its strength and vitality for all time, as also the Empire of the Incas, Napoleon’s France, and Carolingian Empire’s Charlemagne illustrated centuries and millennia ago. Having elected Mr Trump as their president, America must now brace up for a rough and disquieting ride; so, too, the rest of the world, which may soon discover that their fascination with America was built on dangerous illusions. And as he leads the US to exit the global power stage, an ambitious nation will seek to exploit the vacuum.
Credit: The Nation
