This was a sales gimmick, not an inauguration.
In theory, there's something admirably American in taking the piss out of the system's pretensions. When Jimmy Carter walked in his inauguration parade, it represented for the moment the final collapse of the imperial executive within which Richard Nixon had hidden his crimes for so long. Barack Obama's embrace of popular culture let some of the stuffing out of the office as well. But this was different.
This was somebody selling something precious and important at a reduced rate of sloganeering. A pitchman's ceremony, the inauguration of President* Donald Trump was a device for selling American democracy a hair-restoral nostrum, a cure for erectile dysfunction, and a full scholarship to his Potemkin University. This was an event in which even Scripture itself was sent through the gang down in marketing so as not to sound too "elitist" for its intended audience of marks and suckers.
Jill D Lawrence and David Mastio/USA Today:
Billionaire Trump promises power to the people
But the new president is hanging with the establishment. Do we believe his words or our own eyes?
Jill: Thus we find ourselves at the surreal moment in time when a candidate who bragged about barging in on near-naked teens in beauty-pageant dressing rooms is now the president who will be visiting wounded warriors in their hospital rooms
David: Thanks to the policies of the last two Democratic presidents, when Trump walks into a wounded warrior’s hospital room, he may well be walking in on a teenage girl. It is discomfort with that social change and middle-American economic stagnation that elected him president.
Pew:
Public Sees Wealthy People, Corporations Gaining Influence in Trump Era
More say people like them will lose than gain influence in D.C.
Asked about how various institutions and their leaders will fare during Trump’s presidency, majorities say business corporations (74%) and the military (64%) will increase their influence with Trump as president.
By contrast, 60% say environmentalists will lose influence, while 54% say the same about union leaders.
Daniel Summers/WaPo:
Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just made pediatricians’ jobs a lot harder
But the implications of a vaccine-autism connection go beyond that. If vaccines genuinely cause autism like their opponents claim, one of two things must be true of pediatricians like me who administer them. Either we are too incompetent to discern the relationship between the two, or we are too monstrous to care. One cannot believe that autism is related to vaccination without simultaneously indicting the overwhelming majority of physicians, nurses and other medical providers in this country. Even your local Rotary Club is in on it.
By saying that immunizations cause autism, Trump is training his sights on me and every other provider who delivers the same care I do.
Greg Dworkin/Real Clear Health:
Vaccinate Vaccines From Partisanship
Last year, in a poll done by Pew Research Center, only 9 percent of the public thought vaccines were unsafe. This, and numbers like it, are a thing we will have to keep a close eye on. Any sign of the vaccination rate dropping or of increased resistance and decreased acceptance from the public will be an alarm bell for all of us to heed.
The concern here is that if we take a tribal nature to science (my tribe is right because it’s my tribe), we will all be in a much worse place.
Daniel T Rogers, writing in the Chronicle and referring to public policy and politics, notes:
“Finding our way back to the notion of truth as the result of a public process of search and debate and deliberation will not be easy.”
Even if it’s not easy, it’s necessary. At least, it is necessary if we want to continue to fight infectious diseases as a greater public good.
Eh, what does that guy, above, know.
Yuval Levin/NRO:
The Republican Health-Care Debate: A guide for the perplexed
What follows, with due apologies for its length, is one observer’s general sense of where things stand. I’ll lay out the logic of the reigning strategy, take up its faults, consider the role the incoming administration has played, and offer some reflections on where things might be headed.
Eliot A Cohen/The American Interest:
Trump lies because it is in his nature to lie. One suspects that there is nothing inside this man that quivers, however slightly, at an untruth. It is not uncommon for politicians, to a greater extent than most people, to believe what they want to believe, or to change their take on reality depending on what is convenient for them. With Trump, however, this will to believe is pathological: his psyche is so completely besotted by Trump that there is no room for anything, or anybody else.
We will not change him—no one can. His children may be able to soften the edges and his most trusted advisers may deflect him off his erratic courses, but nothing will teach him gravitas, magnanimity, or wisdom. Until he is impeached, thrown out of office in four years, succumbs to illness, or lasts through eight years, he is what we have learned he is, and will remain so. The beginning of wisdom will be to treat his office with respect, but him with none, because it will achieve nothing, and because as a human being he deserves none. He will remain erratic, temperamental, vengeful, and perhaps most of all, deeply insecure. A man who mocks John McCain, denounces Gold Star parents, snarls at an actor who spoofs him, and makes fun of a crippled reporter is someone whose core is empty, and whose need for approbation is unlimited because the void within him is so complete.
Remember, there are conservatives that have as much trouble with him as we do. There is common ground to find here.
John Paul Bammer/Guardian:
America: behold, your Snowflake-in-Chief
We “special snowflakes” are delicate beings obsessed with our own uniqueness. We identify with genders and sexual orientations we made up off the top of our heads in order to confuse people. We demand that everyone at whatever liberal arts college we’re doubtless attending respect these fabricated identities, and we punish our peers with mean words like “bigot” and “racist” when they refuse to comply.
We can only survive within the confines of our “safe spaces,” where we are protected from criticism and dissenting opinions. When we are confronted with a point of view from outside our snow globe of mandatory tolerance, we become, as the deplorables say, “triggered”. The word was originally intended to describe a reaction to a reminder of trauma, but has been recast as meaning almost any kind of upset, no matter how minor.
In sum: self-imposed victimhood, an inflated sense of self-importance, an inability to handle criticism, and a totalitarian demand for respect are the criteria that define the snowflake. It’s ironic, then, that the public figure who most reliably projects those qualities at the moment is Donald Trump. America is soon to inaugurate its first Snowflake-in-Chief.