Newspaper headline after Trump's combative Inaugural Address
Friend and foe know Donald Trump can talk alright. He is media's ideal Controversy, the surefire frightener who, most frighteningly of all, is not on the horizon any longer, but undeniably arrived in person.
Yet you can agree with nearly every word of nearly every article or post, and a reservation still won't go away: an intuition, never quite rising to full confidence, that nevertheless democracy, the 'demos' if you like - but more than that, the vast joined-up context today, the whole shebang - has become far more complex and volatile than all the warnings of its demise would have us believe. Is democracy dead or dying? Is Trump Adolf Hitler reborn in our times? Is he all-powerful? Can anyone have it all his own way anymore?
And did the Founding Fathers somehow miss the real threat: What if someone just ignores the Constitution? Or does the question miss the point? That all action creates reaction, and reaction, action: that nothing simply stops there.
Trump rejoices in reaction, turning the clock back to the great imagined past he embodies for his conservative supporters. While it’s transparently bogus to many, it makes him friend, hero and Saviour to many more. For the faithful, the water of the Gulf of Mexico is turned into the wine of the Gulf of America, and Mars will miraculously rise again as Mar-a-Lago perhaps, as soon as he can lay hands on it.
But his measured words to another Big Man, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, betray Trump, as well as betray his wonderful promise to put an end to the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. And so, in time, for all the talk?
Reality imposes its own checks and balances. You suspect he's in for big trouble, not today, not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of his life.
