The new president: He won fair and square, and his agenda should be heard
I did not watch the inauguration, actually. Well, not in real time. I got to 'see' it from the point of view of a number of people – via phone with my family, via reports in my email from friends, and a flood of social media.
It was Martin Luther King day, for one thing, and anyway, I was sulking.
My day started early — for this crowded semester, my weekends and holidays are crammed with grading. So, was in the middle of reading through a paper in "Political Parties and Interest Groups" — something on how the first political parties developed in the U.S. — when my friend Sarah (she and her husband live and work in DC; not in politics) reported in.
She was out for an exploratory walk down to the Capitol to check on the situation. The new president had decided that it was too cold to hold the thing outside (as a fellow adopted Floridian, I totally sympathize) so he'd moved things indoors.
'All these people walking around aimlessly,' she said, 'There's no rendezvous point. I seriously don't know what their objective is. Especially since the Park Service took away the Jumbotrons.'
Folks kept trying to hand her 'Commemorative Programs' (she demurred). Her vague purpose was to check to see if the flags were, in fact, at half mast for Jimmy Carter's memorial and she fed me a running count: Florida House had theirs at half-staff; the Capitol itself was at full, etc., etc.
Symbolism means something?
And 'wandering aimlessly' pretty much covered my day as well. I did not vote for the guy, I did not want him to win and it would be forgivable, I think, to simply soak in self-pity, or anger, or spew apocalyptic visions from my own dark crystal ball into this space. I was loser in this game, this time, and 'entitled' to run amok.
No. That's cheap, childish and un-American. But how should losers view the 'new era'?
From here, for the moment, I'll take a note or two from Joe Biden, a cat I hugely admire as a lifelong servant to the nation – not always right, not always on target, not always my fave – but a servant of the people, calling the shots as he saw them.
Dangerous drivel: Tying California disaster aid to a change in policy | R. Bruce Anderson
Biden did not avoid the inauguration, he went, he smiled, he paid tribute to the office and to the people who had put both men on that stage.
Donald Trump is no longer 'Mr. Trump.' He is president of the United States, and all that goes with that. For the next four years, he is the face of this nation, and of the American people, and he deserves an even break.
It's not a question of whether Trump 'deserves' this — it's that the American people do. He won, fair and square, and his agenda should get its hearing. But it has to be heard, and not simply dismissed by those who were on the other side of the ticket.
Politics will play out (more or less) as the founders intended: with debate, ugly reality checks, court battles and political punches thrown. We're a fractious nation, and we always have been, but somehow, we've managed to keep it interesting for almost 250 years.
A Republican senator said the other day that he was 'ready to look forward to the next four years, not backward at the past,' and we can take a note from him as well. As with all politicians, Trump is going to say things and do things I strongly disagree with, but I am happy to wait until he says and does them.
When I meet someone for the first time, and they discover what I do, they say — without fail — 'wow, you picked a heck of a time to be a political scientist!' And you know what? Whether it was 1995 or 2005 or 2025, they have always gotten that right.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.
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