Trump breaks tradition, seals historic Capitol return

It appears that US President Donald Trump followed the advice of his aides not to give his inaugural speech on Monday — a day that weather forecasters had predicted would bring subfreezing temperatures and frigid winds — at the West Front of the Capitol, in the open, where newly-elected chief executives are traditional sworn in and address the nation on Inauguration Day, but indoors at the Rotunda, the domed, circular hall in the Capitol.

That way he would be sure to avoid the fate that befell the 9th US president, William Henry Harrison, who gave his own speech, on March 4, 1841, in chilly weather and rain, in the open, followed by a round of receptions in his wet clothing. Predictably, the 68-year-old incoming president caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, from which he never recovered. Three weeks after taking the oath of office, Harrison was dead.

After Trump read his address to a crowd of dignitaries assembled there, which included three former presidents, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama, as well as outgoing president Joe Biden, he gave another, albeit rambling Trumpian one, absent teleprompter, in the nearby Emancipation Hall, where he riffed freely to his heart’s content in a speech he later described as “better than the one I gave upstairs”.

What a show! There has never been a president like Donald John Trump in American history.

Without him, you’ll agree, American politics would be boring. We have not been able to look away as we watched the drama of this once reality TV personality and real estate mogul unfold before our eyes, wanting as we did all the while to see where it would go and wondering how improbably its protagonist has insinuated himself with such facile ease as a phenomenon to reckon with in American political culture, beginning on June 16, 2015, when he slowly descended the golden escalator to the basement of his eponymous New York Tower to announce his White House run, a run whose coverage at the time was not considered by news reporters as a senior gig but as one given to interns.

But Donald Trump did make it to the White House and, after a four-year hiatus, he returned to occupy it again earlier this week, telling Americans, officially in his Rotunda speech, while referring to the assassination attempt against him in July, that “I felt then and I believe even more so now that my life was saved by God to make America great again”, repeating again a great slogan embedding a great claim about how simple is history and how facile is figuring out the world’s workings and humanity’s discontents.

And that includes the supreme slogan, America First, favoured by his millions of supporters, which presumes that the United States is effectively a large family whose members’ manifold destiny dictates that their grandiose priorities shall always trump (yes, that’s the right word here) those of people living abroad — whether in Greenland or in Canada and whether around the Panama Canal or around the Gulf of Mexico.

But, as we say, the people spoke, and what they said when they spoke at their ballot boxes was that they chose Trump over his rival in the presidential race — though in reality their man got less than 50 per cent of the popular vote. But that’s the nature of the system, determined as it is by a quirky Electoral College.

But, at the end of the day, as former president Barack Obama opined in May 2017, mere months after Trump began his first term in office, to an audience in Milan, Italy, out of all place — an audience he was urging to engage in politics — “You get the leaders you deserve.”

As for those in our part of the world wondering what henceforth America’s “foreign policy in the Middle East” will be like, well, the new occupant of the White House will soon be edified by his advisers that the region has undergone tectonic shifts over the last year (in flux more than it had been in decades). Whether Donald Trump will repeat the same mistakes his predecessor made there or be a “wild card” or, as he prides himself on being, a “dealmaker”, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, don’t sweat over trying to explain the trump phenomenon, the complex political, social and cultural forces that underpin his rise and rise. Phenomena are called that because they’re inscrutable.

The man, like it or not, for the next four years of your life and mine, is going to be Mr. President, yet again. Let’s get used to it — even though for those of us who did not vote for him it would be done under duress.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.