Listless, uninspired and robotic: Trump’s vision of a “golden age of America” rings hollow

Also arrogant, uninformed, just plain stupid, and as usual, too much makeup

Flags still flew at half-staff at Capital today

The only thing he didn’t do was invoke Hannibal Lecter.

The rest of the pieces of Donald Trump’s standard rally speech were there for his second inaugural address Monday: the meaningless lies, the empty chest-beating threats, the insane repetition of “as never before” braggadocio, a pandemic of pandering and self-promotion.

There were high points in the grotesquerie – he’s going to “take back” the Panama Canal because we have been “treated so badly” and somehow China owns it now, or something – he’s going to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, which means, we must assume, another map assaulted by a Trump sharpie, and by God, that will be that!

Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations, as he pledged, is so empty a threat, it’s as if a piece of paper in Washington D.C. will scare guys wearing respirators in a fentanyl lab down in Zacatecas. Feeding red meat to the Christian Nationalist right that there will now be two “official” genders is not just a rhetorical bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos, it will have real effects on the lives of real transgender people —and in the Rotunda of the nation’s Capitol on Martin Luther King Remembrance Day, it got a rousing cheer.

If you were looking for a theme to the new Trump presidency, he gave us one: “A new golden age of America,” which for me, anyway, invoked images of the Trump Tower lobby’s mix of knick-knacks and 80’s “luxury” writ large. It’s all he can do, really – sell an alleged idea like real estate. It’s the biggest, it’s the tallest, it’s got more floors, it’s the most expensive, it’s got more gold leaf, and as we know from Donald Trump’s past, a likelihood of bankruptcy therefore looms.

That’s the problem with bragging: you set expectations so high, there is no possible way to meet them. Ten million deportations? Gone – Poof! Drill baby drill? The oil companies have already drilled so much we’ve got more than enough oil, and he can’t add to U.S. fossil fuel production without significantly driving down the price of gas and oil and hitting his billionaire donors where it hurts: their wallets.

And Trump’s inaugural address omitted one of his greatest expectations, repeated time and again on the campaign trail, that he would end the war in Ukraine before he was inaugurated. That one slipped down the memory hole without even a whisper. He gave us a hint today that his answer to a lot of intractable problems is to do nothing at all.

This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest, follow this link:

Arrogant and stupid...he's baaaaack!