“America First” has now be spoken in an inaugural address. This was quite similar to Trump’s convention speech: dark, defiant, filled with talk of “American carnage”, a landscape dotted with tombstones. This was vintage campaign Trump. “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
If you didn’t hear it, that’s about all you need to know. This speech was about grievance and reclamation, reclaiming power, wealth from those who’ve stolen it. These themes can make sense and be salutary for countries which are weak, battered and poor. When they become the rallying cry for the strongest and wealthiest of countries, that is always dangerous. Our work is cut out for us.
This is from President Trump’s new official White House bio …
Mr. Trump won the election on November 8 of 2016 in the largest electoral college landslide for a Republican in 28 years. He won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984. Additionally, he won over 62 million votes in the popular vote, the highest all-time for a Republican nominee. He also won 306 electoral votes, the most for a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
In one of his first official acts as President, Donald Trump issued an executive order taking his first swing at Obamacare. The order, signed in the Oval Office this evening, directs the federal government “to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” of the Affordable Care Act. But beyond its general emphasis on easing the burden and giving the states more flexibility, it doesn’t offer specific guidance or direction.
The full text of the executive order:
Trump’s apocalyptic inaugural address was pure Steve Bannon, and a White House official now confirms that it was written by Bannon and Stephen Miller. In another of those weird recent attempts to draw historic parallels between Trump and Andrew Jackson, Bannon is quoted as saying, “I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House. It’s got a deep, deep root of patriotism.”
But if you read Jackson’s first inaugural address, it is full of the modesty, humility, self-deprecation and traditional appeals to our better nature that are historically associated with presidential inaugural addresses. There is nothing in it on par with Trump’s “American carnage.”
Yesterday’s saddest trombone
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(Photo: Jeff Malet)
Secretary of state when he awoke yesterday morning, and now just walking the dog down Pennsylvania Avenue during the women’s march:
One of the outside groups supporting Jeff Sessions nomination as attorney general is running a TV ad in DC titled “Champion” that calls him a “civil rights champion” and associates him in images with Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Lewis. It’s a remarkable re-write of Sessions’ life and career:
Trump is spending a decent part of his informal speech to the staff of the CIA talking about how the press covered up how big his inaugural crowds were.
“We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning and I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I said wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was … it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practical nobody standing there.”