Like Flies Drawn To Manure - The Inauguration Of Donald Trump

Found in the Papua New Guinea Courier, 21st January 2025

To Washington DC, where a Who’s Who of the world’s worst people just descended on Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Like flies drawn to manure, Miloni, Musk, Milei, Bezos, Bolsonaro and Farage buzzed into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the 1st adjudicated rapist become the 47 th President of the United States of America. The stench was everywhere; being a brownshirt was important, but a track record of brownnosing was vital. Hence, there was no invite for Marine Le Pen, who, despite being a bigot, is not a bootlicker.

Not that the lack of an invite stopped an A-List of Britain’s most limited people – think Laurence Fox, Ant Middleton, Liz Truss – from crossing the Atlantic to be in the vicinity of a man who laughs at disabled people. Like Avengers Assemble if the Avengers in question were Britain’s biggest fuckwits.

Another hatecrasher was Suella Braverman, who on arrival looked distinctly unslept and unhappy, as if she’d just remembered she was Suella Braverman. When asked if she’d been invited to the inauguration she unconvincingly swerved the question and said she was looking forward to going. Which is odd because when she was home secretary she used to dream of deporting uninvited guests. I guess dreaming’s hard when you’ve got jetlag.

And so it comes to pass that ‘political strategy’ is reduced to chasing Elon retweets, that cringe and fringe politicians are now mainstream, and that Trump tells us he was ‘saved by God to make America great again’. US oil and gas will soon be shipped around the world in the presence of evident reality – 1.5 degrees of warming, anybody?

Denial of truth in the interests of oligarchy and nativism might seem to be the most alarming thing about Trump’s presidency, but its defining marker will be his graphene thin skin. Due to concerns about bums on seats, he moved his $170 million inauguration indoors. (‘If he can’t handle one polar vortex,’ quipped Greenland’s premier Múte Egede, ‘he can’t handle Greenland.’) Going indoors limited proceedings to 400 attendees; the other 220,000 tickets (reselling on Craig’s List at $500) were deemed ‘commemorative’.

The faithful didn’t care. The rest of us, however, wait for Trump to deem votes merely ‘commemorative’ too. Or for that God he mentioned to wake up and stage a coup.

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