Skylarking with Donald Trump and buds

If you’re looking for hijinks, both low and high, then you’re in for a treat the next four years. This much is clear after just a week of Donald Trump’s second White House tour.
Aides to President Trump promised an opening administration salvo that would “shock and awe.” While I’m not sure about the “awe,” the “shock” is palpable. Democratic heads are spinning like tops. It’s been a dizzying few days. As the newly-inaugurated president crowed, “I’m back!”
The inauguration itself, moved indoors this year due to the cold (hey, it’s January), presented a rich portrait of a country in the full embrace of, well, the rich, or, shall we say, the richest. Seated on the inaugural stage just one row behind the new vice president, J.D. “Kid” Vance, were Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk of X, Tesla electric car and rocket-launching fame and fortune.
Their combined wealth exceeds $1 trillion.
Since Trump’s election in November, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk have added $233 billion to their bank accounts. “No wonder,” Bernie Sanders quipped, “they were sitting right behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.”
(The importance Trump attaches to these three gentlemen may be ascertained by the fact that states’ governors, no less, were relegated to a side room, where they watched the proceedings on a video hookup.)
Zuckerberg and Bezos are defined by their dough. They certainly have no principles. At one time or another, both men demonstrated a certain antipathy toward the president, and they were admirable in other ways as well. Zuckerberg cast his lot with the good elections crowd while Bezos became the publisher of the Washington “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Post.
Then, post-election, Zuckerberg and Bezos scurried to Mar-a-Lago, kissed the ring, and ended up with front row seats in the Capitol Rotunda on inauguration day.
Musk is a story unto himself. The cash cow from South Africa managed to perform perhaps the most menacing augury of the next four years at a post-inaugural gathering of the faithful. “Thank you for everything,” he began, before slamming the palm of his hand to his heart and then thrusting his right arm out in a stiff salute, before repeating the gesture to the audience in back of him.
It was stunningly and quintessentially un-American. It was, in a word, frightening.
“He endorsed the far right neo-Nazi party in Germany,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said of Musk the next day.
“If you’re cool and want to defend the ‘Sieg Heils’ and the Nazi salutes … that’s on you,” congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed, adding, “I’m not with the Nazis.”
Musk defended himself on X with a lighted-hearted air of nonchalance. “… Bet you nazi that coming,” he responded to his critics.
So many laughs, so little time.
While swearing to God to uphold the Constitution, the incoming 47th president failed to place his left hand on the two Bibles his wife Melanie held for his use (one was a Trump family Bible, the other one bears the imprimatur of Abraham Lincoln, who used it for his 1861 inauguration).
In his inaugural address, Trump, referencing his miraculous escape from an assassin’s bullet in Butler last summer, anointed himself as God’s own instrument in making the country “great again.”
The president, parroting the Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt, trumpeted that “ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation, and right now our nation is more ambitious than any other.”
The president promised to annihilate every challenge, deport every migrant, oppose any diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrat, and teach every school student to honor John C. Calhoun again.
And he pledged to do this and more not in a hundred days, not in a thousand days, not over the course of his administration, nor even in his youngest son’s lifetime on this planet, but almost immediately, like in the next few weeks.
“My recent election is a mandate to … reverse a horrible betrayal,” the president said, “and … to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.”
In order to assure the survival and success of freedom, Mr. Trump turned his hijinking gaze on the Panama Canal and “expanding our territory.” It almost goes without saying that the new president said his top desire was to be a “peacemaker” and a “unifier.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.