On Friday, Donald Trump, the embodiment, instrument and provocateur of American animus, was installed – and I use that word with purpose and displeasure – as America’s 45th president. He delivered a particularly inauspicious speech, presenting a vision for America that would best be described as aggressive atavism, a retrograde positioning of policy that threatens to drag the country back to a time of division and fear and hostility, when some stand in the light by casting others into darkness.
The speech was replete with phrases never before uttered in an Inaugural Address. Bleed, carnage, depletion and disrepair. Ripped, rusted and stolen. Tombstones, trapped and windswept. Urban, sad and Islamic. It felt at times as though he were reading aloud from a post-apocalyptic movie script.
Indeed, some have pointed out that portions of the speech sounded eerily familiar to one delivered by the movie villain Bane in the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” Bane, too, promises: “We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you, the people,” even as he plunges the fictitious city into chaos.
There were few overtures to his opponents, let alone his enemies, little attempt to seek unity and amity.
Trump set forth a portentous proposition Friday. Saturday’s Women’s Marches across the country and around the world answered with a thundering roar.