The Life in My Years

January 23, 2025
January 20th was Inauguration Day. I’d been dreading that day since weeks before the November election when I’d resigned myself to the blunt reality that Donald Trump would be reelected (It was while we were in Vienna that I turned to my wife and said, “Trump’s going to win”).

By the end of Inauguration Day I was spent. Despite having kept the promise I’d made to myself to avoid Donald Trump’s inauguration, a trickle of news had leaked into my day. They say that one can drown in an inch of water and by day’s end I was left suffocated by the ooze of Trump.

The snippets that had leaked out ran the gamut from the ridiculous and eye rolling (renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Mount Denali back to McKinley) to the brazenly scandalous (pardoning of the January 6th traitors and insurrectionists), to the cruel and unconstitutional (the ending of birthright citizenship). That none of it was unexpected, didn’t blunt the ensuing outrage. But shock and awe was the incoming administration’s strategy from the start.

Late that afternoon, I was sitting on the front porch, reading and listening to music, enjoying the last hours of sun. When Stevie Wonder’s classic, A Place in the Sun came on I was nearly reduced to tears. Is there anymore, as the song says, “hope for everyone?”

January 21, 2025
I normally start my day early; anytime between four and six. Once awake, I’m quick to rise. No sense in lingering when there are plenty of things to do.

On this particular day, the day following Inauguration Day, I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to stay in bed, go back to sleep. Maybe sleep through the whole day – or at least pretend to. Was there a way to sleep through all 1460 days of Trump? Maybe a coma was what I secretly wished for. Get through the nightmare and wake up to the proverbial new dawn.

A little voice inside advised me to simply avoid the news. Avoiding the news has been the prevailing prescription for maintaining sanity. Late yesterday a friend sent me a text message, “I am not watching the news at least in the near term for the next year.”

Isn’t ignorance part of what landed us here?

I allowed myself a few minutes of ignorance and then got out of bed to catch up on the news. Avoidance of the news and quiet submissiveness are the mother’s milk of autocracies.

I started the day by reading a transcript of Trump’s inaugural speech and then watched a video of Trump’s later speech in front of the sheep at the Capitol One Center. Both speeches were catalogs of lies, grievances and rhetoric characterised by white hot anger. It was a bitter prevaricator who stood before the world, unleashing his screed. I also watched a few videos of inauguration day.

The inaugural speech was held in the capitol rotunda, a cruel irony in that it was the very place that had been violently invaded by a pro-Trump mob of insurrectionists during the Trump coup attempt just four years prior. The criminal returning to the scene of the crime.

Outside on the streets Trump’s unofficial Brown Shirts, the Proud Boys, staged a march in full uniform. Munich 1935 came to mind.

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It’s traditional for the incoming president to take office with grace, giving some deference to the outgoing leader. But that isn’t Donald Trump’s style. Trump could’ve treaded lightly with some diplomacy, good will and fence mending, but he decided instead to stomp into office and shame his predecessor in the process.

“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before,” said the president-elect.

He could’ve left it there and been presidential. But instead Donald Trump couldn’t help but be Donald Trump as he launched into a barrage of lies, half truths and libels, as the outgoing president sat helplessly behind Trump, enduring the defamation.

Trump’s disparagement of Biden was the classic gambit of the despot. Peruse some of Hitler’s early speeches and you find the same tactic of slander. A tyrant can’t masquerade as a savior without having someone or something to save the nation from.

The messianic message, likely written by Stephen Miller, Trump’s personal Joseph Goebbels, was given full throat when Trump said, “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

At this, the throng of bootlickers on the dais rose as one in thunderous applause and the sheep in the audience bleated their approval. It wouldn’t have shocked the world if members of that pathetic throng began writhing on the floor in evangelical rapture.

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This year, Inauguration Day coincided with the Martin Luther King holiday and as expected, Trump channeled Dr. King’s dream, “Today is Martin Luther King Day and his honor — this will be a great honor — but in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”

Those words were so much profanity as awaiting his signature later in the day was the executive order revoking the dream of birthright citizenship.

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Following a sham deference to unity, pride and the Constitution, he went on to enumerate some of his executive orders; some literally fly in the face of unity, pride and the Constitution, while others are pure theatrics.

He ordered his cabinet to bring down his inflated version of inflation, as if a wave of the hand and a few strokes of a pen could vanquish a worldwide economic calamity.

In another act of fakery he declared a national energy emergency, because heroes and authoritarians need villains to vanquish. In order to quell his counterfeit “emergency” he recited the battle cry of the climate denier, “drill, baby, drill” as if the oil companies haven’t had free rein to produce more oil. Along with his swipe at electric vehicles and a promise to leave the Paris Accords, it signaled a return to climate change denial just as climate change induced fires were scorching Los Angeles.

Hypocrisy was laid bare in his order “to immediately stop all government censorship.” Unless this means that high school curriculums will be able to include Catcher in the Rye, and the 1691 Project and libraries in red states can stop fighting book bans, this EO is a blatant fraud.

Among the scariest designs is the designation of the drug cartels as terrorist organizations, clearing the way for sending American troops to Mexico or other sovereign nations. He must have been watching, A Clear and Present Danger.

Among the cruelest is the wide sweeping anti-trans order that seeks to, redefine gender (either male or female) at the federal level, erase recognition of trans people in government communications, cease the issuance of gender-corrected U.S. passports, and blocks federal dollars from being used to “promote gender ideology.” If there is any provision of this order that is the most heinous and downright evil it is the one that bars incarcerated trans women from being housed in women’s prisons (translated that means trans women will be housed with men). Let the raping commence.

The whole spectacle was an affront to middle class and working class America, as it was attended by a syndicate of forelock tugging, anti-working class billionaires that included the fawning triumvirate of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zucherberg whose combined net worth amounts to just short of a trillion dollars. And if the sight of a rising oligarchy wasn’t bothersome, there was Tulsi Gabbard, who is pegged to head up national security and has been accused of being a national security risk, seated next to Shou Zi Chew, the head of Tik Tok, the video hosting service with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

The whole tableau was a repudiation of decency, humanity, science, common sense and democracy. The event was less a speech of unity and purpose and more one of division, malice and deceit. The shameless assemblage of stooges in attendance was either truly taken in by the whole farce or played along in the belief that there’s some gain to be had by conspiring.

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The inauguration speech was followed by the inaugural parade, moved indoors due to cold weather conditions. It began with our fearless leaders entering the arena to the strains of martial music and the huzzahs of the devout. I wouldn’t have been shocked to see Trump enter the arena wearing a full ostentatious military uniform, sham medals clinking together on his chest (But it was only day one. He has another 1400+ days to pull off that masquerade).

The speaking portion began with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East who commenced with what will certainly be the first of many revisions of history, as he credited Trump with arranging the hostage deal in Gaza, the structure of which had already been in place for eight months. (That it was finally consummated just as Trump was taking office was likely a combination of Benjamin Netanyahu’s final jab at Joe Biden and a kowtow to Trump)

Trump followed. He was scheduled to speak for ten minutes but since he’s never met a microphone he doesn’t like, he rambled for over thirty minutes, leaving those standing behind him to shuffle their aching feet for half an hour.

The inaugural speech was the ceremonial Trump. This second speech was the real Trump, with the same lies and complaints delivered in his cheap lounge act riff.

There was nonsense about wind powered energy going dark on calm days, and dirty Chinese air dropping on American neighborhoods ( he used the argument that if China is making the air dirty, we might just as well follow suit, a sort of version of justifying jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge because your friends did), followed by the fabrication that the January 6th insurrectionists, “didn’t do stuff wrong,” followed by some childish mocking of his predecessor. He went on to call MAGA the greatest political movement in history. In the end he returned to his messianic messaging, proclaiming that if he had been president, the war in Ukraine would have never happened.

By day’s end whatever dignity that the United States still possessed was circling the drain. I was left feeling ashamed, angry and aghast.

And fearful of the following 1459 days.