Must-Read: Simon Schama: Joyless Fantasies Abound in Trump’s Inauguration Speech
Must-Read: Simon Schama: Joyless Fantasies Abound in Trump’s Inauguration Speech: “The 45th president is not only a cantankerous man but… a mentally lazy one…
…who cannot be bothered to read daily intelligence briefings and whose speech was a barely defrosted abridgment of the acceptance tirade at Cleveland… a red rag of an address stitched together from other people’s rhetorical cast-offs…. Bannon… may think he’s restarting the New Deal’s investment in infrastructure but, if historical memory serves, Roosevelt did not actually start with a massive tax break for the top 1 per cent. In all likelihood the president will not be sweating the small stuff, emerging from the sand trap every so often to snarl and bludgeon frightened executives with taking away their toys unless they repair immediately to Duluth and open a widget factory. The actual heavy lifting will be delegated to his cabinet which largely conforms to what the Greeks called a “kakistocracy”: government of the least-qualified….
When it’s a matter of Rick Perry, nominated as energy secretary not knowing that his department is responsible for America’s nuclear stockpile, incredulous derision turns to red alert…. A minority vote has, through the anachronisms of the electoral college, imposed the priorities of rural and small town America on the great, populous, cosmopolitan cities…. The rest of the world might feel inclined to greet this swerve into isolationism, the arrival of a smaller, narrower, not a greater America, with a shrug were it not for the fact that however much President Trump wants to decree it away, global interconnectedness is an unavoidable fact of life in the 21st century…. Mr Trump’s repeated declaration of Nato’s obsolescence, and the doubt he has cast over the treaty’s obligation to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all, is tantamount to an invitation to Russian adventurism… greeted by ultranationalists and fascists from in Europe with the kind of manic glee displayed by beach bullies kicking in the sandcastle….
“The time for empty talk is over. The time for action is here,” the president proclaimed. The American majority, multitudes of whom look on his proposals with dismay and revulsion, should now take those words to heart.