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David Mastio is an opinion columnist for The Kansas City Star.
If Donald Trump has a natural environment, it is cognitive dissonance. Nowhere was that on display more than the moment in his inauguration speech when he said, “I want to be a peacemaker and a unifier.” No American politician for 50 years has thrived more on strife and division than Trump.
But the dissonance in that first breath could not do justice to the dissonance in the words he uttered next. “We’re taking the Panama Canal back.” Of course, we are — peacefully and in total unity.
Trump’s speech was a lagging indicator of the divergence between what Trump is and what America imagines him to be. In the moment he took the presidential oath, half of America saw a God-touched savior about to return America to its rightful “manifest destiny” and proper ambition. The other half feared a nation on the verge of fascism and, in now former President Joe Biden’s telling, a tech billionaire oligarchy.
I don’t think Trump himself knows which is right — hence the cognitive dissonance of a man who Monday embraced the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “dream” and promised to deliver it at the peak of a popularity that started to rise with the false declaration that America’s first Black president was born in Africa.
This disparity between the symbolism and the reality and rhetoric behind it was on display all day. America’s least godly president went to church surrounded by his most ardent supporters, still unrepentant for ghastly sins against our Republic, most notably his inspiration of the Jan. 6 insurrection that attempted to overthrow an election in 2020. Serially bankrupt and unfaithful, Trump sought prayers from both Catholic and protestant religious dignitaries who condemn such things among their faithful and wink at them from Trump.
The MAGA movement embodies this dissonance. A populist movement led by billionaires. An enemy of China who wants TikTok to turn into a 50/50 venture between the avatar of capitalism and the tech bros of communism. A party of traditional and rural Americans that takes power as its leader gathers $50 billion in new paper wealth created by a digital memecoin many of his followers don’t comprehend. A legion of Cabinet nominees more controversial than any that come before but which appear set to sail to confirmation rubber-stamped by allies.
And the jarring contradictions of Trumpism spur his opponents into their own. Trump had tea in the White House and then rode to the Capitol in a limo with a man who, by all accounts, sees Trump as an authoritarian threat to constitutional ideals. Democrats came out in force to uphold the norm of a peaceful and united transfer of power after saying nothing when their president just days earlier shattered constitutional norms with an effort to push the Equal Rights Amendment into the Constitution via a tweet.
As Trump steps into the White House unleashing a torrent of executive orders, he does so using many powers so carefully amassed and centralized by the political opponents who see no threat to Democracy in the kingly office they have created, but rather think the threat comes from Trump.
To listen to Trump’s campaign rhetoric, only months ago America was on the ropes in its darkest hour for generations. In his inauguration speech, Trump announced that “the Golden Age of America begins right now.”
We all hope it does. That despite the dissonance, the better Trump imagined by his supporters wins out.
Today America is already “proud, prosperous and free.” Let us hope that we stay that way as Trump Makes America Great Again. Let this truly be the “start of a thrilling new era of national success,” and not something far, far worse.
