[Special] Revisiting Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017

All articles from January 20, 2017.

The Atlantic: 'America First' - Donald Trump's Populist Inaugural Address by David A. Graham

Reciting a litany of horribles including gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, and unemployment, Trump told the nation, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

The inaugural address was unusually dark and political, delivered in a forum where new presidents have tended to reach for a language of unity, positivity, and non-partisanship. In many ways, the speech drew directly from the tone and approach of Trump’s often very-negative campaign rally speeches, once again showing that the “pivot” many observers have long expected Trump to make toward a more unifying and detached tone, is not coming. President Trump so far looks much the same as candidate Trump, and his speech was a strange milestone in a strange rise to power, one that was viewed as impossible just months ago.


Washington Post: In His Inaugural Address, Trump Leaves America’s Better Angels Behind by WaPo Editorial Board

Like his alarmist speech to the Republican National Convention in July, this one painted a false picture of an impoverished, crime-ridden country that has been cheated and victimized by Washington elites and grasping interests abroad. Mr. Trump’s dystopia may exist in places but not generally in a nation whose economy has rebounded from the 2008-2009 recession and is now outperforming other advanced industrial democracies. Stoking discontent may serve Mr. Trump’s political interests, but seems unlikely to contribute to the country’s stability or unity of purpose. Nor will painting these purportedly unchecked ills as imposed on the “righteous public” by a vaguely disloyal “small group in our nation’s capital” — the same people, presumably, who had honored him, and the country’s democratic heritage, by their presence on the inaugural platform. If such words are capable of unifying Americans, it will only be in a shared sense of free-floating grievance against a scapegoat, or scapegoats, designated by Mr. Trump.

Some heard in this an echo of Jacksonian populism. And, to be sure, there is a rich American tradition of attacking establishment fat cats and promising reform. But there’s a world of difference between decrying dysfunction and insinuating disloyalty. Even Andrew Jackson might have blanched at the grandiosity with which Mr. Trump invoked America’s “glorious destiny,” or his repeated promises to abolish the tedium of democratic deliberation — “talk” as Mr. Trump dismissed it — through “action.” Old Hickory’s 1829 first inaugural address humbly included a pledge to “keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the Executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority.” Mr. Trump, by contrast, spoke in oddly mystical terms of “a nation that is only living as long as it is striving.”

The Atlantic: Presidents Aren't CEOs by John Paul Rollert

Beyond a strange insensitivity to the contending interests that enliven American politics as well as the dubious presumption that most political leaders are either knaves or fools (for otherwise they would just “get things done”), those who labor under the fallacy of the CEO president betray a profound ignorance about the actual powers of the American presidency. Then again, they’re in good company. “The most startling thing a new President discovers is that his world is not monolithic,” an unnamed Truman aide told Theodore White in The Making of the President 1960. “In the world of the presidency, giving an order does not end the matter. You can pound your fist on the table or you can get mad or you can blot it all and go out to the golf course. But nothing gets done except by endless follow-up, endless kissing and coaxing, endless threatening and compelling.”

The contrast to the head honcho of a Fortune 500 company should be obvious. CEOs may assume their orders will be dispatched faithfully by subordinates, if not always to their full satisfaction, but when dealing with members of Congress, a president’s power is by and large confined to the power of persuasion. Yes, the president does have a limited battery of carrots and sticks—the promise of a political appointment, for example, or the threat of withholding support in the case of a bruising primary—but for the most part, when one can neither freely promote nor fire the individuals one must work with in order to get anything substantial accomplished, they are power centers unto themselves rather than pawns to be moved at will.

Washington Post: Trump's Dark Promise To Return To A Mythical Past by Anne Applebaum

We live in a culture that celebrates disruption, innovation, entrepreneurship, risk, diversity and change. Yet many people dream of stability, security and homogeneity, even racial purity, as well as a world in which the United States is always and forever unchallenged. Indeed, the desire to turn the clock back is so powerful, so persuasive and so appealing to the “real Americans” who support it, the “forgotten men and women” of the inaugural address, that it has brought us the presidency of Donald Trump.

Over the past few days, multiple polls have shown that Trump is the least popular new president in recent memory. He received 3 million fewer votes than his opponent. He won with the aid of a massive Russian intelligence operation, and by propagating lies about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But don’t let any of this fool you: Do not underestimate the appeal of his nostalgic vision. His call for America to “start winning again,” his denunciation of the “crime and gangs and drugs” of the present, these are so powerful that he has triumphed despite his dishonesty, his vulgarity, his addiction to social media, his lack of religious faith, his many wives, all of the elements of his character and personal history that seemed to disqualify him. Surrounded by the trappings of the White House, its appeal may well increase.