gracchusdixit

If the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump had been a TV show, it would have been cancelled after the first episode.  By all objective measures, the latest of these quadrennial spectacles has turned out to be an historic flop.  First-rate celebrity entertainers were conspicuously absent.  The second-rate entertainers who were on display were embarrassingly amateurish.  The parade of marching bands who filled out the truncated program would have been more at home on a high school football field.  And the sight of Trump himself, stuffed into a tuxedo like a bloated pumpkin, struggling to dance with his wife without stepping on her toes or crushing her to death, was ridiculous when it wasn’t outrightly repugnant.

More consequentially—and far more ominous—was Trump’s “acceptance speech,” which was less about “acceptance” than about aggressive self-assertion.  His harangue was little more than a string of fear-inducing slogans from the campaign trail, stitched together like a patchwork quilt.  In all of its seventeen minutes, there wasn’t a scintilla of grace, grandiloquence, or generosity.  For its ungrammatical banality and sheer awfulness, Trump’s speech must surely be accounted the worst in American history.

The only memorable words in this ugly discharge—”American carnage”—were the most fear-inducing and dishonest words of all.  Trump would have us believe that the United States of America is a shambles, that our cities are ridden with crime and chaos, that order must be restored lest we descend into a hell on earth from which only he, the new supreme leader, can save us.  His most devoted and blinkered supporters may actually believe this apocalyptic fiction.  If so, they are beyond reason or redemption.  They are simply—and sadly—suckers and fools, the very sort of losers Trump holds in utter contempt.

It is unlikely, of course, that any of that matters to Trump himself.  We have learned by now that all he cares about is his own gargantuan self-esteem and his “brand” as the richest, smartest, “winner” on earth.

Which is why, down deep, Donald Trump must be so galled and infuriated by the tawdry reality of his inauguration.  In the darkest recess of his self-regard and self-loathing, even a sociopath like Trump must on occasion see the truth when it stares him in the face.

Before the inauguration, Trump boasted that it was going to “break all records,” and on the day after, his mouthpiece, Sean Spicer, tried to assert, against all evidence to the contrary, that Trump’s boast had come true.  Spicer, of course, was lying.

Attendance at the 2017 presidential inauguration was anemic.  The number of people who came to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 was roughly two million, a crowd so massive that it filled to the gills the great mall that runs from the Lincoln Memorial to the steps of the Capitol.  As Trump put his hand on the bible under that looming dome a few days ago, it was plain that large swaths of empty real estate were lying at his feet.  Those who study such things estimate that Trump’s crowd was a third the size of Obama’s.

Where, one must ask, were all those Hillary-hating ex-coal miners just up the road in West Virginia, who voted for Trump in droves?  And where were all those Trump-loving ex-steel workers in nearby Pennsylvania, whose votes helped to swing the electoral college in his direction?  Thousands of Trump’s purportedly enthusiastic supporters were just a bus-ride away, but they didn’t bother to show up.  Maybe they didn’t have enough money to buy a bus ticket.  Maybe they didn’t care.  Maybe the “movement” Trump talks so much about isn’t a movement at all but, rather, little more than a disgruntled and anxious growl from people who voted for Trump the way they buy lottery tickets, hoping against reason to hit the big one but expecting to lose their two bucks.

Even worse for Trump’s self-esteem, the “Women’s March” that occurred the day after his inauguration completely upstaged the inauguration itself.  At least half a million demonstrators jammed the streets of the nation’s capital.  In other cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and countless others—as many as three  million demonstrators joined in.  And around the world, in the capitals of Europe and Asia, millions more did the same.  These demonstrations were a complete rebuke of everything Donald Trump stands for, and their sheer size makes its impossible for him, or the Republicans in Congress who slavishly support him, to lay any credible claim to a “mandate” from the American people.  As they do their worst, which they almost certainly will, their political legitimacy will evaporate.

Worst of all for a media creature like Donald Trump were the inaugural television ratings, which may be the ultimate and only measure by which Trump judges his self-worth.  The A.C. Nielsen company estimates that 31 million people watched Trump’s inauguration.  That sounds like a big number, and it is.  In comparative terms, however, it is humiliatingly small.

Far from “breaking all records,” the audience for Trump’s inauguration was middling.  Eight million more people watched Barack Obama’s swearing-in in 2009.  Ten million more watched Ronald Reagan take the oath of office for the first time.  More people tuned in to see Jimmy Carter of all people, hardly one of our country’s most popular or successful presidents, put his hand on the bible.  Even Richard Nixon, who, after Trump, may qualify as the most unpopular president of modern times, got a bigger audience for his first inauguration.

More than 120 million people voted in this election, and about 60 million voted for Trump. Yet only half that number bothered to watch the culminating moment that crowned, and presumably validated, their choice.  If Trump is leading a “movement,” as he claims, it would appear that millions of his followers weren’t moved enough to turn on their television sets.

In television terms, Trump’s campaign to win the Republican nomination was indisputably a “hit.”  It now seems that his inauguration and the opening days of his presidency are no less indisputably a “flop.”  We can only hope that this “flop” will be cancelled before it does irreparable damage to the country.