Donald Trump plays in church | The New Yorker

It's generally awkward to take photos in church. But at St. Johns, the Episcopal church located directly across the street from the White House in a quiet Lafayette Square neighborhood, photography is unavoidable at least once every four years. Every Inauguration Day, many of the most powerful officials in the United States government, passed and quickly enrolled, go to the so-called Church of the Presidents, nominally to pray. The intimate sanctuary, with its air of contemplation, is thus a small part of the theater of American continuity. Presidential administrations, so often very different from each other in their tone and political orientation, are fettered by this slightest nod to God.

Politically, it's a long time ago in 2020, but just yesterday, when you think about it, the air outside that church was filled with tear gas. Troops deployed on the orders of Donald Trump pushed back a crowd gathered in the square to protest police brutality. Trump needed space to stand in front of the church marquee and hold up a Bible: a photo op dense with symbols over which Trump, producer of spectacle, yes, but rarely of deep meaning, had no interest in exerting a control. He just wanted a photo.

On Monday morning, just before his inauguration, Trump was back inside the church, taking advantage of his ceremonial power for a few extra drops of self-aggrandizement. There were photos from the benches, including of the group of tech titans who made a habit of following Trump everywhere from Mar-a-Lago to Washington, D.C., throwing laurels at his feet and offering gestures. sacrificial. They all want to be seen wanting him to succeed. We've come a long way from their original pose as benign geniuses who wanted to bring peace, love and connectivity to the world, one byte or piece of binary code at a time. These were the people who used Gandhi's image in television advertisements for personal computers. Maybe they were meant for this recent meeting with Trump: They would all like someone to notice that they are the messiahs, not the bleeding man up there on the cross.

No one seemed particularly pious; you'd be a fool to expect it. Mark Zuckerberg's flowing hair and vacant look could be glimpsed, as could Jeff Bezos' shiny face, which each time is somehow plumper and wetter than the last time you saw him. A few rows in front of the technicians was comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who pretended to just be asking questions but who has recently become convinced that everyone but him is always being unfair to his new friend Don.

Soon, Trump got out of his limousine looking like he usually behaves at times like this: like a child already eager to get out of church. Because he has no sense of continuity with the past or indebtedness to the future, he seems disconcerted by the choreographies and ceremonial duties of the state. It includes big offices where you fire people, or honk the horn with the bigwig who will answer your call (these days, that's most of them), or take photos of yourself looking busy and important. But an altar on which one kneels will always be foreign to Trump. He was accompanied by his wife, Melania, who was ready for another tour of duty, wearing a wide-brimmed navy and white hat that was reminiscent of Michael Jackson. The edge of the razor blade said Stay Away and I'd rather not have to see it all at once. The Trumps are now experienced in their version of this job, and unfortunately so are we.

After church, Trump headed to the White House, where he had his obligatory meeting with Joe Biden. Trump withdrew from that meeting in 2020, because, again, he thinks this stuff is for idiots unless he's the one who wins, and then went to the inauguration ceremony , inside the Capitol, yet another place he found astonishing ways to desecrate. You'd think he'd feel funny standing there on the rotunda dais, about to take the oath of office shortly after inciting a riot in the same building. But Trump's sense of humor, it must be admitted that it exists; Like it or not, his act at Dangerfield is one of the reasons why his continued political relevance does not extend very far. He certainly has no irony when it comes to interior design. His great aesthetic talent is transforming austere environments into playgrounds for schlock.

The rest of the crowd, seen through the roving irony-hungry cable cameras, was a ridiculous adjacency: Jared Kushner sat not far from Zuckerberg, both shaking hands robotically and otherwise playing with each other. human social skills. Jill Biden, who reportedly gave her husband some of the worst advice of this American century, a quarter of which has already been spent, looked stricken and seemed at times, at least to me, to be holding back tears. She should have devoted this emotion to a selfless conversation with Joe well before July. A piano rendition of Thomas Chisholm's hymn, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, played while Elon Musk looked around with his gonzo eyes and inexplicable body language. A fickle billionaire willing to advise an unfaithful president, a version of American greatness that only the most acerbic satirist could love.

Cameras were set up in a hallway leading to the rotunda, so viewers could see past attempts at national stewardship enter the building. Bill and Hillary Clinton entered, looking tense. Barack Obama, who has made a habit of showing up at these kinds of things, Michelle said no, thank you a few weeks ago at Jimmy Carter's funeral, another centerpiece for the affirmation of an American civic religion in loss of momentum, did his usual bop, cool guy act that's we're starting to get old while real emergencies continue to lick our heels. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, these totems of Democratic impotence, walked in together and acted as if they had been instructed never to shoot even a passing glance at each other. The old bipartisan establishment that somehow continues to give way to real estate fraud in New York seemed just as gleeful and confused as Trump showed it twice. Trump is a disaster, but he confirmed the growing feeling, almost everywhere in our country, that these people deserve to be defeated, again and again, until they change or, better, pass the baton for good .

Trump's constant bad taste in music is almost funny. He brought in Christopher Macchio, apparently a favorite of his late brother Robert, to sing not one but two pieces at the inaugural ceremony. As things progressed, Macchio struggled with his own tone and, while singing a slurred version of the song Oh, America, struggled against the tempo set by whoever was on drums.

Timothy Dolan, the publicity-friendly Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of New York, impressed upon the congregation that without God, our efforts turn to ashes. It's a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., whose holiday yet another irony, probably sadder than the others but no less natural, an outgrowth of this nation's ever-multiplying paradoxes, has been made, this year, to share space with the tireless agitator the Central Park Five. . Franklin Graham, son of Billy, one of those classic, local examples of slight decline from one American generation to the next; his father could be a bigot at times, but at least the man could preach by bowing to Trump, directing his prayer more to the man than to God. Over the past four years, there have been moments. I'm sure you thought it was pretty bleak, he said. But look what God has done.

When Trump was sworn in before Chief Justice John Roberts, he gave a smirk that broke the fourth wall. He knows better than anyone where the cameras are and who his real audience is: the people back home huddle around their television sets. What he said with that gesture was: Now, would you like to look at that? These losers let me come back!

Without complete knowledge of the final days of Trump's life, it is impossible to state this as fact, but I was sure, watching Trump deliver his inaugural address, that he was reading it for the first time. His energy was low, especially at first, and his tone of voice was that of an elementary school child being pushed to the front of the class and forced to recite. He underlined the wrong parts of several rather long sentences and skimmed through entire paragraphs whose content he clearly found boring. Sunlight is pouring over the whole world, he said stupidly. When he read his speechwriters' promise that the new administration would not forget our God, Trump added, in his mockingly solemn way, what seemed like a simple improvisation: I can't do that. And it's true: you can't forget what you never thought about.

It's strange though: Trump clearly has no real respect for religion and its followers. During at least part of his swearing-in, his hand was not on the Bible Melania held for him, but hanging at his side and at times having no connection to the strong. He has a disjointed belief in Providence that has buzzed beneath all manner of American glories and malfeasance, but he has chosen, this time, to present himself as a particularly privileged vessel of the Almighty. He is still using the truly shocking assassination attempt last July in Pennsylvania to paint a glowing image of true religion. I was saved by God to make America great again, he said. If you believe in God, it's hard to deny that he was spared that day. But to keep the faith and love life as it presents itself to us, much less as America, requires maintaining a rich sense of divine comedy and cosmic unpredictability. Who can know, until time runs out, what Trump still has to accomplish? Maybe just to keep repeating lies so grandiose that we can all assume their opposing meanings are uncontroversially true, like this big lie thrown out later in the speech: That's what I want to be: an artisan of peace and a unifier.

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