America First. Has the U.S. gone to war again? If so, why? And with whom? The whole world, I take it.

President Trump (fit of coughing here) gave a campaign speech of an inaugural address or vice versa and the thing dripped with threat.

“American carnage,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscapes of our nation,” “the crime and the gangs and the drugs,” “our soldiers will never forget... we all bleed the same red blood of patriots,” “America will start winning again, winning like never before.”

Goodness me. Things seemed very dark, and then it rained as Donald Trump began chunking out his words of menace.

It would have been a perfectly adequate speech in 1944 to build courage on the home front while U.S. soldiers were stalled by the Germans at Bastogne.

But with Barack Obama having handed Trump a bright economy — GDP up at a 3.2 per cent annual rate, unemployment at a nine-year low — why the weird gloom and the feeling of a shakedown?

Trump’s speech was the only speech he will ever be capable of giving: he must paint a portrait of dystopia in order to present himself as a rescuing hero.

It’s very reality show. America is a reno gone wrong, and only tax relief for Huge Corp. will make your basement great again. It will be the greatest basement in the history of cellars. America said yes to the dress, but it made her look portly. Only Trump could save the day.

At inaugurations, most presidents realize, perhaps sadly, that they’re president of everyone, not just their base. Trump will never grasp that.

His speech was a classic example of what the theorist Richard Hofstadter described in his essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. “The clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style (Trump, if you’re following me) finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.”

Hofstadter wrote that in 1963 just before his nation went full-bore violent and febrile, and I’m not even referring to JFK’s assassination. The Sixties was an era of distrust of all government institutions, pointless wars and an angry split between generations, so very like our own dear Age of Anger.

The theme song of both eras could easily be The Doors’ The End, with Jim Morrison singing “This is the end, beautiful friend.

“This is the end, my only friend, the end.” Yes, that could work.

But here’s the weird part: Trump and his current wife, Melania, were set to dance at an inaugural ball to Paul Anka’s MyWay . The song not only dates Trump horribly, it’s a horrible song, easily as eerie as The End. My Way begins, “And now the end is here, And so I face the final curtain.”

It’s a song for depressed blowhards, it’s puffy with defensiveness and resentment. Sinatra hated it. Richard Nixon’s farewell speech was basically My Way. Why does Trump wish to dance to it?

Trump is the most socially inept president since Nixon, who wore a dark suit and black wing-tipped shoes on the beach at Key Biscayne.

Look at Trump lumbering like a bear at the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday night, offering an incomprehensible stream of consciousness and then later at a donors’ event, talking to the crowd like a Las Vegas lounge singer, a Nick Rails crooning greasy gratitude for huge money.

Even at the inauguration, he never looked comfortable or happy. He was bored, he twitched, during Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech he looked sour and tried to catch Vice-President Mike Pence’s eye — Pence declined, looking straight ahead — and he had a mean brooding look as Schumer spoke of the people who are not Trump’s type. Am I stuck with them too, was the thought radiated by Trump’s always-revealing face.

Well, yes, when you’re president, you consider the views of every segment of the citizenry. That’s what turned Obama’s hair grey so fast. Of course Trump’s hair is permanently cornsilk yellow. His locks shall grow not old as we that watch them in distaste grow old.

Schumer read from Maj. Sullivan Ballou’s 1861 letter to his wife Sarah a week before he was killed at Bull Run. The lines about patriotic self-sacrifice will slay any audience.

Had he read the famous bit, the part about the dead “flitting around those they love” — “if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by” — I would have cried, but it was not a day for tears.

Everything was awkward: the way Trump’s greatcoat flapped in the wind — did no one have the courage to tell him to button it? — the way he hardly mentioned women at all, the embarrassingly skinny voice of Jackie Evancho singing the anthem and the almost entirely white choirs singing without joy.

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It was darkness at noon, a real first for the American peoples, plural. Via the Washington Post, here are some of Trump’s firsts as president: to have hosted a reality show; moonlight even now as a producer; marry three times; be a billionaire; deliver filth on Howard Stern’s radio show; live in a skyscraper coated in gold and bad taste; brand meat with his name; be 70 years old; have written a dozen motivational books; appear on WWE Raw and WrestleMania; have been targeted by a Justice Department discrimination investigation and civil suit...

It was an abnormal day peopled by strange creatures and encoded with menace. I could go on. I will not.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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