Today brings something my parents never saw in their lifetimes — the inauguration of a guy who was elected president of the United States twice but non-consecutively. Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump are the only two people ever to achieve that feat.
I looked up Cleveland and found he won the popular vote three times, something that only Franklin Roosevelt also accomplished. It seems he was a classical liberal, which means he would be a political conservative in today’s environment.
So today we again “meet the new boss.” The phrase is usually paired with “same as the old boss” thanks to Pete Townshend, but I wonder if that’s really true this time. I’d like to believe that it isn’t. Trump was not able to do much last time about his promise to drain the swamp. Certainly the swamp creatures frustrated, vilified and ultimately beat him by 2020, but this time he’s had eight years to study them more carefully, and he has the popular vote behind him this time.
I have some strong views about government and two wishes — that it become smaller and eventually go away, restoring our basic freedoms, and that it stop waging and sponsoring endless war across the planet. By recruiting the likes of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to ostensibly study ways to reduce government, and the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken veteran who advocates for peace, Trump gave me hope.
For the past four years faceless puppet masters have been operating the machinery of leviathan behind the figurehead of a confused old man, and Trump has appointed a small army of disruptors to lead the various departments of government that have so abused us. Whether they can succeed in ferreting out the worst offenders remains to be seen, but at least the puppet masters’ ghastly efforts have been made more visible and defeated at the ballot box.
Inauguration Day coincides this year with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating a man who advocated for freedom and human dignity through nonviolent civil disobedience. Like many before him and since, he was taken from us by violent means. As always, evil triumphed for a moment by taking a good man, but it utterly failed to kill the idea.
Time will tell if the infestation in Washington, D.C., and other halls of power can ever be eradicated, but as long as the ideas of freedom and human rights survive, we can hope and pray.
