Well, it’s official. Donald Trump is now officially our nation’s first orange president. If you watched his inauguration speech today, your ears are probably still bleeding.
I managed to power through the address by not making direct eye contact with my TV and also keeping the volume as low as I could while listening from another room.
Despite the utter contempt I have for Trump, I watched his address for a couple of reasons. One, I guess I was still hanging on to a small glimmer of hope that Ashton Kutcher would jump out from behind the podium and let us know that we’ve all been Punk’d. I also watched it because it’ll make tomorrow’s inevitable Saturday Night Live takedown of it (and Trump’s inevitable Twitter meltdown over the episode) even funnier.
Lastly, I watched because up until last year, I was a journalist working in TV news. While I’m disgusted (and frankly, frightened) of the way Trump has attacked that profession, I also know that his address would have news value. And I assumed it would be enlightening in the same way that Dolores Umbridge’s first speech after being hired at Hogwarts was enlightening.
The biggest things that I took away from the speech were that for one, Trump clearly had a ton of help writing it, despite his own hilarious tweet of him doing it all by himself like a big boy.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/821772494864580614?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I know he had help because the speech contained words more than 3 syllables long, and adjectives beyond yuge, fantastic, wonderful, terrible, sad, etc, and obviously it was longer than the 140 characters he’s used to.
The second thing I learned is that Trump definitely thinks America right now is the bowels of hell. There are factories “scattered like tombstones” across the land, and anyone living in an inner city should definitely never leave their panic room, ever. He described this as “American carnage,” which I’m totally calling dibs on as either a great band name or my upcoming horror screenplay.
Other than that, it was just under 20 minutes of a bunch of bullshit about how he is going to fix every problem ever despite lacking coherent plans to do so blah blah blah. He didn’t really bother calling for unity like he did in his acceptance speech, probably because he knows we know he’s full of crap whenever he talks about that.
I saw a lot Trump supporters on my social media feeds today saying it’s time to support this president and basically, “Stop being crybabies.” To which I say, how about Trump goes first? He’s still yet to make any genuine overtures to the 66 million or so people who didn’t vote for him. He still thinks we’re a bunch of haters and losers, and he still can’t take the slightest criticism without throwing a tantrum.
But he needs to know this: we’re not going anywhere. And we’re not going to let him get away with this shit. And we’re definitely not going to restrain ourselves from saying, “I told you so” when the shit starts to hit the fan.