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Today we were treated to a spectacle both insidious and overwhelming. The spectacle was intended to make you disoriented and despairing. The intention was to make you stop thinking and acting.
Concentrate on the images: the line of Israelis wearing yellow scarves whose family members have been taken hostage by Hamas in Gaza being forced to stand as supplicants behind Trump for a long time as he droned on about whales and windmills. All the brass bands forced to circle in front of the dais with Trump looking bored and being perturbed by JD Vance’s children. Ivanka dressed like Patty Hearst as Tanya. Melania channeling Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Trump refusing to put his hand on the Bible for the oath from the Lee Van Cleef/Puritan dictator moll.
Trump moved the whole inauguration inside at the last minute because of optics: so the crowd would look bigger inside and the images would be better (more focused on him) and the wind wouldn’t blow his fake hair up. All the people who traveled to the capital from across the country to see the parade and speeches were left out in the cold to watch the festivities on TV in restaurants and hotels. “Did you like my speech?” “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again!”
Trump made the MAGA faithful wait interminably in the Capitol Hill Arena miles away while he had lunch with the front-row Tech Billionaires in the actual Capitol, surrounded by giant statues and memories of January 6th. At this lunch, one could glimpse Ivanka/Tanya hobnobbing with Clarence Thomas, Barron with Bezos, Tim Cook bored by Don Jr., and Pete Hegseth plotting something sick with Clarence and Ginni.
What is going to happen when enough of the working-class people who voted for Trump realize that they’ve been conned? On Day One, they have been notified that their presence is no longer required. The parade has been canceled. If they turn against Trump, where will they go?
On Day One, right out in the open, Trump abruptly ended sanctuary proceedings for tens of thousands of legal immigrants, tried to do away with Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing birthright citizenship, fired at least twenty career diplomats at the State Department, and withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement for a second time, joining other non-signers Iran, Eritrea, Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen.
Trump also pardoned most of the January 6th rioters, and commuted the sentences of 14 others, even those who attacked police officers and were accused of seditious conspiracy, saying, in effect: “If you commit a crime in my name, it’s not really a crime. I’ve got you covered, just as the Supreme Court has me covered.” Standing in front of the Israeli family members of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th, Trump compared those hostages to the “hostages” of January 6th.
The Proud Boys marched in celebration today in the capital. The marriage of paramilitary force and the state changes the structure of society.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.