No one watching Friday’s Inauguration ceremony could miss the contrast between the gracious civility with which the incoming and outgoing presidents treated each other and the utter repudiation President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address made of Barack Obama’s eight-year reign. You could hear it at the start of the 16-minute speech. Trump thanked the Obamas for their “magnificent” aid throughout the transition. He then pivoted, with a loaded “however,” to how momentous this particular change of chief executives really is. It’s not just a change of administrations or parties, Trump averred. “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people . . . . What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people,” he said, echoing James Madison in Federalist 51.
You couldn’t have a starker contrast of visions than this. Goodbye to Obama’s power-swollen embodiment of the administrative state, hatched by Woodrow Wilson and dedicated to the proposition that the governors know better than the governed, whom they shepherd with public-spirited expertise for the people’s own good, whether the people like it or not. The people’s elected representatives, in this vision, matter little. They can serve, like Nancy Pelosi, as a rubber stamp for the ruler’s edicts, carried out by such executive-branch administrative bodies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Or they can get out of the way of the mighty pen and phone of the philosopher-king, whose demeanor constantly shows his exasperation at lesser beings with narrower minds.
No more, promised Trump. No longer will Washington politicians and the Washington establishment prosper, while factories close and ordinary citizens struggle.
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