[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a PhD in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]
Dear Dr. Steve,
Did you watch Trump's inauguration on Monday?
Signed,
Mag
Dear Mag,
Well, it was either that or a live production of Minions. Dr. Steve isn't sure.
They moved Trump's inauguration indoors, saying Washington's spell of cold weather was “dangerous.” Because clearly, when you are in the process of making a demented, amoral simpleton the most powerful man in the world, your main concern is safety.
But why not? It made perfect sense to hold this event in the very space defiled by Trump's feces-smearing mob four years ago.
And what a shit show it was. How darkly amusing to recall, months ago, the outrage of American evangelicals who thought Paris organizers were parodying The Last Supper during the Olympic opening ceremonies. Parisians could have recreated The Last Supper with hamster disciples and a chipmunk Jesus and it would still have been less grotesque than the tableau seen Monday in Washington.
America staged a solemn farce, a time-honoured display of pomp and circumstance to celebrate an odious, babbling imbecile, a human rebuke to every moral and ethical value, a purulent prick who stood on a different stage only months ago, ranting about Black people eating dogs, eating cats. No savage critic or angry performance artist could ever mount a more damning commentary on American hypocrisy than the show the United States proudly offered to the world on Monday.
They didn't let the mob in this time, though. The great unwashed had served their purpose. No room for them inside. Space was so tight in the Capitol rotunda you could barely squeeze in another wallet. It was grovelling-room only.
Trump's right-hand mogul Elon Musk was there of course, fresh off a SpaceX rocket launch that exploded before screaming back into the atmosphere in flaming pieces, possibly causing property damage. Musk described the fiasco as “entertaining.” Disturbing from the guy who is also reviewing the Social Security program. No doubt his first step will be making popcorn.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith intended to be at the inauguration, perhaps showing her Canadian pride with a big American flag, but it didn't work out that way.
Smith got herself a ticket for the big show, ready to exchange friendship bracelets with the other not-so-Swifties, only to find out she was not important enough to keep it when the show moved indoors.
What a shame. Hope Smith didn't spring for a commemorative tattoo.
The Alberta premier certainly tried to kowtow her way inside, angering other premiers by refusing to join the united front against proposed Trump tariffs. She is like a Chevron station on the Crowsnest Highway — in Canada, but not of it.
There's a name for people like Smith. American and Canadian spellings sometimes differ, but even the Americans put a “u” in “sellout.”
In politics there is always an awareness of the turning wheel. Governments come and go, parties rise and fall, this too shall pass, etc. But the U.S. election of 2024 feels very different. It feels more like a loss of innocence.
Yes, Trump won in 2016, and that was a shock. But then came the next four years, years of turmoil, horror, incompetence and hideous slapstick, capped off by the treasonous and violent betrayal of every democratic principle upon which America is supposed to be based. American voters watched Trump as president, watched his escape from consequences, and then his vituperative campaign of performative animosity, racism and delusional idiocy.
Week after week, month after month, they watched him. And then went to the polls to endorse it all. This isn't a this-too-shall-pass moment. It's a moment when the masks have dropped, a moment of appalling recognition. It's the moment America showed its true self.
This is hardly the first time American pieties have been revealed as bald-faced lies — ask any Black American who fought the Nazis and came home to Jim Crow. But we were supposed to have left that in the past, to be revisited only in Ken Burns documentaries that detail righteous battles and inspiring breakthroughs.
The 2024 U.S. election showed the naive amongst us, a very large group indeed, what the real story is — that in our own enlightened time, a cheap grifter and shameless hate-monger can pave the road to victory with streams of atavistic bile, and that people who sincerely believe themselves to be patriots will embrace and celebrate him, a leader whose contempt for the Constitution is just one facet of his total disregard for any rule or law restricting his own vainglory and bottomless greed.
Pierre Poilievre likes to say that Canada is broken. Not yet. But today America really does seem broken. How will superhero movies even work now? How can anyone watch a depiction of good struggling with evil, knowing that in reality evil has its own cable news network and most of the audience just voted for the Joker?
Four years ago, we thought it would be a cold day in hell before Trump ever regained power. That it was. The forecast looks chilling.
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