Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 18

A Short History of 'America First'

President Trump’s speech Friday will go down as one of the shorter inaugural addresses, but it will also be remembered for its populist and often dark tone.

“From this day forward,” Trump said at one point, “it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

Trump appears to have first used the phrase last March in an interview with The New York Times when he denied he was an isolationist. “I’m not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,’” he said. “So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’”

Trump insisted publicly that he wrote his own speech, going as far as to tweet a picture of  himself  holding a pen and piece of paper in his hotel at Mar-A-Lago. But as The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, Trump’s speech was at least in part written by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, two of Trump’s senior advisers. Bannon, as has been widely reported, was previously CEO of Breitbart, the conservative news site that he’s described as a platform for the alt-right, a movement that combines elements of white nationalism and economic populism.

“I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House,” Bannon told the Journal. “It’s got a deep root of patriotism.”

That maybe true, but Bannon’s stated positions, white-nationalist support for Trump, and the president’s tepid disavowal of that support are only likely to raise more questions about what he meant by “America first.”

The phrase in itself might provide comfort for those of Trump’s supporters who have long railed against what they see as lawmakers in Washington catering to special interests, corporations, and other countries at the expense of, in their view, the American worker. But the phrase “America first” also has a darker recent history and, as my colleague David Graham pointed out Friday, was associated with opponents of the U.S. entering World War II.

The America First Committee (AFC), which was founded in 1940, opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and was harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, but also counted among its ranks prominent anti-Semites of the day.

“It had to remove from its executive committee not only the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford but also Avery Brundage, the former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had prevented two Jewish runners from the American track team in Berlin in 1936 from running in the finals of the 4x100 relay,” Susan Dunn, the historian, wrote on CNN last April.

But charges of anti-Semitism persisted, and were compounded with perhaps one of the most infamous speeches given by one of AFC’s most famous spokesmen, Charles Lindbergh. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, Lindbergh expressed sympathy for the persecution Jews faced in Germany, but suggested Jews were advocating the U.S. to enter a war that was not in the national interest.

“Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh said. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

“Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

He insisted he was not “attacking either the Jewish or the British people,” but “I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

The speech was labeled as anti-Semitic. Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had reported from Europe, wrote: “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.” Those sentiments were echoed widely.

Three months after Lindbergh’s speech, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to enter World War II. Three days later, the AFC disbanded.

But echoes of “America first” have persisted in the years and decades since. Most recently it was employed by Pat Buchanan, who used it as the slogan for his presidential run in 2000 on a Reform Party ticket. Buchanan, who has labeled World War II an “unnecessary war,” had also campaigned against free trade. Indeed, Trump, who sought the Reform Party nomination at the time, called Buchanan “a Hitler lover.”

NPR’s Ron Elving argues that “assuming he is aware of at least some of that history, Trump is demonstrating his confidence that his adoption of a phrase can supersede its past.” The president may say he wants “America first” to mean “we will not be ripped off anymore,” but shaking off the phrase’s ugly past, especially after an inauguration speech that offered little outreach to the millions of Americans who fear what his presidency may bring, could prove difficult.

Barack Obama and Hidden Figures: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Barack Obama Was the Perfect Pop-Culture President

Todd VanDerWerff | Vox

“Obama was as comfortable on Fox News as he was on The Daily Show or reading mean tweets on Kimmel. He could play games with Jimmy Fallon or talk policy with journalists, and act demonstrably different with both. It often seemed like he truly understood pop culture, particularly hip-hop and prestige TV, the two most dominant cultural forms of his era. It was like he chose a persona for each occasion—goofy but proud dad, cool guy, serious wonk—and then stepped into it.”

Juice and the Theater of Black Nihilism

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib | MTV News

“The easy thing would be to mention the cycle of imitation in life and art, but I think there are violences so common that calling them imitation when spilled onto a big screen is somewhat reductive. What I find myself more interested in, with both Khalil Sumpter and with Bishop in Juice, is what so rarely happens with black people who live and die and do wrong today: an ability to visualize a complete life behind simply a finger that pulls a trigger, and a willingness to understand what drove them there. In this way, Bishop and all of his complexities were the perfect vehicle for Tupac’s entry into film.”

Frank Ocean as an Emersonian Hero

Sophie Atkinson | The Rumpus

“The irony of all this is that, as Emerson recognizes, someone who couldn’t care less about how they come across is all the more charismatic and convincing. Emerson talks of an honor developed by carving out your own path regardless of external opinion … Reddit didn’t obsess about Ocean’s release-date dipshittery earlier this year because it hates Ocean, but because, like most of us, it’s in love with him. It’s the same vibe that person you went on two dates with and forgot to text back gives off when you run into them at a party. They want you more because they know you’re not consciously rejecting them; your priorities are just elsewhere.”

Hidden Figures and the Ambitious Working Mother

Stacia L. Brown | The New Republic

“Rare is the civil rights-era biopic that gives us this vantage of the black experience. Though discrimination is at play throughout, scholarship and tenacity are even more prominent. Though hushed household tensions do arise between men and women, they are quashed in favor of the family’s health and the woman’s upward mobility. Plenty of factors must have contributed to Hidden Figures winning the box office for its first two wide-release weekends, but the gifts it bestows and restores are what make it an invaluable viewing experience.”

Is La La Land a Good Musical?

Rob Harvilla | The Ringer

“If any song here will endure once awards season is over, bet on ‘City of Stars,’ a fine, understated bit of Chet Baker worship, with a delicate gravity not worth flouting. The melody is so sturdy and unflashy that it can carry Gosling, not the other way around; simplicity is a plus when your singer can’t handle much complexity. It’s also a bit of an earworm, and if you’ve had it stuck in your head for weeks, you are entitled to your discouraging words.”

What’s at Stake if Trump Kills the NEA

Marc Hogan | Pitchfork

“For free-market libertarians and religious conservatives, the idea of federally funded art was probably always going to be a tough sell. But for the rest of us, to put this in context: what Trump would be destroying here is barely a rounding error in terms of the overall U.S. budget, but of great value to the artists it goes to support.”

A Man in Himself Is a City: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson

Charles Taylor | Los Angeles Review of Books

“We can’t ignore the soulful stoicism on Adam Driver’s face. It’s the look of a man who has accepted his life and his responsibility for maintaining it. There is, in the way he nuzzles the still-sleeping Laura when he wakes in the morning—tenderly, exploringly, the edge of hunger kept at bay—in the way he wakes to the aroma of her baking and says the word ‘cupcakes,’ savoring it and relishing its familiarity, the ability of a man who, as a poet should, appreciates the ordinary moments given to him. And yet, in some part of him, we see the uncertain longing for something more.”

The Gender Fluidity of Krazy Kat

Gabrielle Bellot | The New Yorker

“P. G. Wodehouse compared it favorably to Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’; Jack Kerouac later said it influenced the Beats. The strip ran from 1913 until 1944, the year that Herriman died. It is set in a dreamlike place called Coconino County, where a black cat named Krazy loves a white mouse named Ignatz, who throws bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy interprets the bricks as ‘love letters.’ Meanwhile, a police-officer dog, Offisa Pup, tries to protect Krazy, with whom he is smitten. The structure of the strip was built on reversals: a cat loves a mouse, a dog protects a feline, and, at a time when anti-miscegenation laws held sway in most of the United States, a black animal yearns for a white one.”

How the Far-Right Is Changing U.S. Publishing

Colin Robinson | The Guardian

“Why all the furore over Yiannopoulos? Those objecting to Dangerous seems more concerned about its anticipated tone than any pernicious, new ideas it may contain. With the start of the Trump presidency comes fear of a new, more vituperative tenor in the mainstream, cementing a national lurch to the right. The American far right is characterized by, as Angela Nagle puts it, ‘a slippery use of irony’; its ‘hip elitism’ allows prejudice to be disguised as harmless entertainment. Yiannopoulos, with his Hugh Grant-like bashfulness and potty mouth, perfectly fits this tawdry bill.”

Donald Trump's Nostalgic, Lulling Inaugural Concert

The slogan “Make America Great Again” has been subject to a lot of debate—when, exactly, are we to believe America was greater before? The Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial Thursday night offered a few answers. From the looks of it, America was great when Lee Greenwood wrote “Proud to Be an American” in the Reagan ’80s, and maybe again when the song became a theme song for the first Gulf War, under George H.W. Bush. It was great under George W. Bush, too—both pre-9/11 when 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite” soundtracked drives to the mall, and post-9/11 when the nation joined in vengeance to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” The red-jacketed members of the Army Fife and Drum Corp suggested yet another Great time: 1781.

Sam Moore, the “Soul Man” singer of the civil-rights era, was there too, but only to sing “America the Beautiful”—it seems 1967 was Not Great. The Frontmen of Country reprised hits from across their members’ heydays in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, yet each of their twangy-melancholic tales of heartland heartache seem, on purpose, out of time. Then there were the lesser-knowns: Utah’s the Piano Guys, inventively defiling a grand piano for a One Direction tune, and DJ Ravi Drums, that friend of yours who badly overestimates how much you want to watch him dominate Rock Band. Both may have built fledgling careers during the Obama era, but this concert marked them as national discoveries of the Trump one.

Nearby, at the recently christened National Museum of African American History and Culture, the anti-Trump Peace Ball spotlighted some artists with more recently renewed credentials for relevance: Solange Knowles, the experimental R&B sister of Beyoncé and the creator of one of the most acclaimed albums of last year, and Esperanza Spalding, a new jazz generation’s adventuresome champion. They depart from Trumpchella’s entertainers not only in hipness or in race—though those things are true, and matter—but in content. Their music breaks borders between genres; their words often challenge America rather than comfort it. On Thursday, Solange sang “Don’t Touch My Hair,” a swatback at the national history of white people helping themselves to the bodies of black people.

Throughout D.C. over the inaugural, other musicians who have pushed forward the sound and sentiment of pop music will play protest gigs: art-rockers The National and Sleater-Kinney at a Planned Parenthood benefit; the iconoclastic future-dance star Janelle Monae on the route for the Women’s March, whose participants boast Beyoncé’s blessing and a chant freshly written by Fiona Apple. Trump meanwhile keeps reaching back, likely due to a blend of preference and limited options. The 75-year-old Paul Anka will sing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for the inaugural dance; the 16-year-old Jackie Evancho, first made famous by singing a 1918 aria on YouTube, delivered “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The music seemed a sedative, calling on America to calm down and let it all happen.

This divide was crystallized in a statement from Inauguration Committee Chair Tom Barrack, who said he’d not asked Trump friend Kanye West to perform at the celebrations that were “going to be typically and traditionally American.” He didn’t quite say West was not “typically and traditionally American,” but it’s nonetheless the implication of this inauguration’s entertainment. Black music of recent vintage, it would seem, has no place in this national center. Ditto formally interesting music of any sort. (Though, in fairness, the Piano Guys tearing up a violin bow was sort of like if John Cage were making children’s music, and it’s always a hoot to see Toby Keith swing a Solo cup around onstage.)

If the music seemed a sedative, that was probably the point; the speeches were full of embattled uplift, calling on America to calm down and let it all happen. Jon Voight cursed “propaganda” that had denigrated the president-elect, and one of the Piano Guys said “it’s time to put all of our differences aside, it’s time to unite our hearts, our minds.” His band then launched into an original number called “It’s Going to be OKAY,” expertly alchemized nitrous oxide from the same tank as Pharrell’s “Happy,” but much less potent. It offered, perhaps unintentionally, what for many is the only believable sort of comfort—not that things would soon be Great, but that they’d be okay rather than, say, apocalyptic.

Earlier on Thursday, news broke that Trump’s administration would try to end the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The concert, then, dovetailed as the vision of a government that, when it comes to entertainment, values comfort and nostalgia over the creation of new art. The suggestion to not think too much, to lean back, might explain how Trump, when he finally took the stage, could tell one of his obvious lies. About having a concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he said, “I don’t know if it’s ever been done before, but if it has, very seldom. … We didn’t know if anyone would come tonight, this hasn’t been done before.”

It of course has been done before, most recently by Barack Obama, who had Mary J. Blige, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, and others at the Lincoln Memorial eight years ago. That show’s very existence, and the vision it offered, is now meant to be forgotten. It was not Great.

'America First': Donald Trump's Populist Inaugural Address

President Donald Trump took office on Friday with an inaugural address that was striking for both its bleakness and its fiery, populist promises for a better future.

“Today we are not transferring power not from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” the 45th president said.

Reciting a litany of horribles including gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, and unemployment, Trump told the nation, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Related Story

Live Coverage of the Presidential Inauguration

The inaugural address was unusually dark and political, delivered in a forum where new presidents have tended to reach for a language of unity, positivity, and non-partisanship. In many ways, the speech drew directly from the tone and approach of Trump’s often very-negative campaign rally speeches, once again showing that the “pivot” many observers have long expected Trump to make toward a more unifying and detached tone, is not coming. President Trump so far looks much the same as candidate Trump, and his speech was a strange milestone in a strange rise to power, one that was viewed as impossible just months ago.

Yet the speech also offered a serious contrast from Trump’s most notable formal speech of his brief political career, his comments when accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in July. That speech verged into the authoritarian, as Trump told voters, “I am your voice.” In Cleveland, he also said of the nation’s challenges, “Only I can fix it,” a highly personalized approach.

On Friday, standing on the western front of the U.S. Capitol, however, Trump traded that in for a populist approach, arguing that his unlikely ascension to the president represented the vesting of power less in himself than in the masses.

“That all changes, starting right here and right now, because this moment is your moment,” he said. “It belongs to you.”

That dismissal of political leadership is surprising for a Republican president who takes office with a unified Republican Congress, though it fits with his anti-establishment tone. While these words appealed to the nation as a whole—despite running one of the most racially and ethnically divisive campaigns in American history, he said that “when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice”—he seemed in some moments to be delivering his promises more to the people who came out to see those campaign speeches, and who stood before him on the mall.

“January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day that the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump said. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

Yet many Americans were not in that group—Trump won millions of votes fewer than Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival who looked on as he took the oath—a fact underscored by the attendance at Friday’s inaugural, which appeared to be more sparse than the two ceremonies for former President Obama. While new presidents have often sought to overcome that division, Trump seemed less troubled by it.

“At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” Trump said, a potential rebuke to the tradition of pluralism and patriotic dissent that has been a defining characteristic of American democracy.

“At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

In that way and in others, Trump’s inaugural address presented a curious contrast with Obama’s first inaugural address, delivered eight years ago. Obama took office in the midst of a massive economic crisis, with Americans losing their jobs by the thousands, and the outgoing president was historically unpopular. Yet Obama’s address, while acknowledging those challenges, reached for a tone of optimism. Trump, by contrast, enters office at a time when the nation is more politically divided than it has been in decades, but is by most other metrics in better shape. The unemployment rate is at its lowest in years, and crime rates are near historic lows. This is not the picture one would get from hearing Trump’s speech out of context.

Nor did Trump offer the customary tributes to the nation’s past greatness, either in the form of presidents of yore or great moments. Where Obama’s two speeches invoked Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy, and Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, Trump said, “Now we are looking only to the future.”

The future he envisions for the United States is one that is inward-looking, seeking to concentrate on how America can help its own people and withdrawing from the world—while also hoping the world withdraws from America.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first,” Trump said, using a controversial phrase, associated with opponents of entering World War II, that Trump reclaimed for himself during the campaign.

“For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump said. But that will change, he vowed:  “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American, and hire American.”

Rather than harp explicitly on immigration, his biggest buzzword during the campaign, Trump instead made a mantra of citizenship: “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” He also made a contrast between those citizens and the political class, a frequent target. “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” he said.

As for foreign policy, Trump promised stronger American borders, and he said the nation would “eradicate completely” radical Islamic terrorism. Aside from those cases, though, he offered an isolationist view of U.S. power, rejecting the muscular approach of presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan in favor of leading solely by example.

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” he said, an apparent message to nations like Russia, whose territorial expansions in Eastern Europe the Obama administration fiercely opposed. “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

There was one more characteristic that distinguished Trump’s inaugural address. It was a speech that made unusually specific promises, eschewing the abstract uplift of his recent predecessors. Toward the end of his speech, which spanned roughly twenty minutes, he warned, “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it.” That could be read as a warning to the other leaders on the dais, but it is also, he seemed to acknowledge, a challenge to himself.

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” President Trump. He has cut his work out for himself.

'America First': Donald Trump's Dark, Populist Inaugural Address

President Donald Trump took office on Friday with an inaugural address that was striking for both its bleakness and its fiery, populist promises for a better future.

“Today we are not transferring power not from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” the 45th president said.

Reciting a litany of horribles including gangs, drugs, crime, poverty, and unemployment, Trump told the nation, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Related Story

Live Coverage of the Presidential Inauguration

The inaugural address was unusually dark and political, delivered in a forum where new presidents have tended to reach for a language of unity, positivity, and non-partisanship. In many ways, the speech drew directly from the tone and approach of Trump’s often very-negative campaign rally speeches, once again showing that the “pivot” many observers have long expected Trump to make toward a more unifying and detached tone, is not coming. President Trump so far looks much the same as candidate Trump, and his speech was a strange milestone in a strange rise to power, one that was viewed as impossible just months ago.

Yet the speech also offered a serious contrast from Trump’s most notable formal speech of his brief political career, his comments when accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in July. That speech verged into the authoritarian, as Trump told voters, “I am your voice.” In Cleveland, he also said of the nation’s challenges, “Only I can fix it,” a highly personalized approach.

On Friday, standing on the western front of the U.S. Capitol, however, Trump traded that in for a populist approach, arguing that his unlikely ascension to the president represented the vesting of power less in himself than in the masses.

“That all changes, starting right here and right now, because this moment is your moment,” he said. “It belongs to you.”

That dismissal of political leadership is surprising for a Republican president who takes office with a unified Republican Congress, though it fits with his anti-establishment tone. While these words appealed to the nation as a whole—despite running one of the most racially and ethnically divisive campaigns in American history, he said that “when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice”—he seemed in some moments to be delivering his promises more to the people who came out to see those campaign speeches, and who stood before him on the mall.

“January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day that the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump said. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

Yet many Americans were not in that group—Trump won millions of votes fewer than Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival who looked on as he took the oath—a fact underscored by the attendance at Friday’s inaugural, which appeared to be more sparse than the two ceremonies for former President Obama. While new presidents have often sought to overcome that division, Trump seemed less troubled by it.

“At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” Trump said, a potential rebuke to the tradition of pluralism and patriotic dissent that has been a defining characteristic of American democracy.

“At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

In that way and in others, Trump’s inaugural address presented a curious contrast with Obama’s first inaugural address, delivered eight years ago. Obama took office in the midst of a massive economic crisis, with Americans losing their jobs by the thousands, and the outgoing president was historically unpopular. Yet Obama’s address, while acknowledging those challenges, reached for a tone of optimism. Trump, by contrast, enters office at a time when the nation is more politically divided than it has been in decades, but is by most other metrics in better shape. The unemployment rate is at its lowest in years, and crime rates are near historic lows. This is not the picture one would get from hearing Trump’s speech out of context.

Nor did Trump offer the customary tributes to the nation’s past greatness, either in the form of presidents of yore or great moments. Where Obama’s two speeches invoked Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy, and Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, Trump said, “Now we are looking only to the future.”

The future he envisions for the United States is one that is inward-looking, seeking to concentrate on how America can help its own people and withdrawing from the world—while also hoping the world withdraws from America.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first,” Trump said, using a controversial phrase, associated with opponents of entering World War II, that Trump reclaimed for himself during the campaign.

“For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump said. But that will change, he vowed:  “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American, and hire American.”

Rather than harp explicitly on immigration, his biggest buzzword during the campaign, Trump instead made a mantra of citizenship: “At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” He also made a contrast between those citizens and the political class, a frequent target. “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country,” he said.

As for foreign policy, Trump promised stronger American borders, and he said the nation would “eradicate completely” radical Islamic terrorism. Aside from those cases, though, he offered an isolationist view of U.S. power, rejecting the muscular approach of presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan in favor of leading solely by example.

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” he said, an apparent message to nations like Russia, whose territorial expansions in Eastern Europe the Obama administration fiercely opposed. “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

There was one more characteristic that distinguished Trump’s inaugural address. It was a speech that made unusually specific promises, eschewing the abstract uplift of his recent predecessors. Toward the end of his speech, which spanned roughly twenty minutes, he warned, “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining but never doing anything about it.” That could be read as a warning to the other leaders on the dais, but it is also, he seemed to acknowledge, a challenge to himself.

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” President Trump. He has cut his work out for himself.

The Otherworldly Genius of The Good Place

When NBC’s The Good Place premiered last September, even early fans seemed uncertain of its future. It was, after all, a non-workplace sitcom with an unusually ambitious premise: A woman named Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies and finds herself in a non-denominational heaven reserved for only those who led the most selfless and ethical of lives. The problem is she was a terrible person on earth who ended up in the so-called “good place” by mistake, so to avoid being sent to “the bad place,” she hides her identity and tries to become a better person in the afterlife.

My colleague David Sims praised the show’s debut but wondered how the story’s apparent plottiness would work in a genre that tends to be more episodic:

After watching the first episode, it’s hard not to wonder how long a show with this ambitious a plot could really run—sitcoms are usually about reverting to the status quo at the end of every episode, while The Good Place’s storytelling feels more like that of a serialized sci-fi drama.

The show’s first season, which ended Thursday, proved that a half-hour network comedy can, in a way, do both: embrace an ambitious, carefully plotted narrative structure, while recognizing the need to revert, to have things go back to the way they were so they can play out differently the next time around. There are plenty of other current shows blurring the line between comedy and drama. But unlike those hybrids (BoJack Horseman, Atlanta, Insecure, You’re the Worst), The Good Place is, tonally, 100 percent sitcom. It has, however, the spine of a twist-y, reality-questioning show like Lost or Westworld—a fact illuminated most clearly by a two-part finale so wonderfully conceived it would be foolish of NBC not to give the show a second season.

(Spoilers for the entirety of The Good Place ahead.)

For about 95 percent of season one, The Good Place (created by Michael Schur) was simply a delightful comedy. It was dense with jokes and populated by well-defined characters played by great actors. It managed to keep extending its premise in unexpected ways every time the story hit a possible momentum-killer—like Eleanor settling down into her ethics lessons with her soul mate Chidi (William Jackson Harper), or revealing to the neighborhood’s chief architect Michael (Ted Danson) that she belongs in the Bad Place. But a show that initially looked like it would follow a flawed woman’s noble efforts at self-improvement, while riffing on philosophical and spiritual concepts, turned out to be much more.

The “what the fork”-inducing final episodes revealed plenty: the existence of a neutral “Medium Place” of “eternal mediocrity” whose sole inhabitant is a cocaine-and-masturbation-loving corporate lawyer who died in the ’80s. The fact that Eleanor’s neighbor Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) died by suffocating inside a safe during a robbery gone wrong. The peculiar nature of the all-knowing judge “Shawn,” who detests hearing emotional testimony and who uttered the actual sentence, “I’ve ruled the fart inadmissible as evidence.” That one of Eleanor’s crimes on earth was “a brief Instagram flirtation with Kid Rock.”

But the biggest reveal, of course, was that The Good Place is not The Good Place at all. It’s the Bad Place—or a Bad Place, only without the requisite lava monsters or physical agony. It’s an experimental hell designed by Michael to trick Eleanor, Jason, Chidi, and their neighbor Tahani (Jameela Jamil) into torturing each other forever; the four of them were specifically chosen because their unique insecurities and anxieties would ensure that they’d make each other miserable forever. Everyone in “The Good Place” but them (and a Siri-like robot named Janet) is playing a part. It’s a Truman Show/No Exit-style nightmare posing, quite convincingly, as a celestial paradise until Eleanor ruined the plans by doing something Michael didn’t expect her to—confessing.

Even before this final discovery, The Good Place slotted in neatly with other recent metaphysically minded shows. But the sitcom’s massive twist felt distinct (and more satisfying) for a couple of reasons. One, unlike Mr. Robot for instance, The Good Place possessed a regard for rules and consequences when it came to its invented world—the neighborhood had an architect, and when something went wrong, there was an observable cause-and-effect reaction. Eleanor starts behaving badly in the afterlife? Giant shrimp fly out of the sky and Ariana Grande starts blasting. Michael can’t find the cause of the disturbances? He has to go into retirement. As mundane or bureaucratic as The Good Place’s laws seemed, they helped the world feel orderly.

With any luck, The Good Place will get to continue its own grand experiment for at least a couple more years.

Two, The Good Place’s status as a sitcom—typically more formulaic, circumscribed by genre conventions, including episode length—may have helped it from getting as bloated or messy as some of its peers in the drama category (Westworld, The OA). Humor aside, The Good Place was a far less frustrating exploration of alternate worlds, while still retaining quite a bit of complexity. There’s some clear meta-commentary going on, with Michael emerging as a sort of grand architect-slash-storyteller, akin to Westworld’s Robert Ford. The Good Place also asked questions of how motivation and intent shape moral character, while playing with bigger ideas about social engineering and the vaguely sadistic nature of consuming stories. After all, most viewers thought they were enjoying a quirky comedy all season. The sly joke implied by the finale: What does it say about us that we had such a rollicking time watching four people make each other utterly miserable?

The structural sitcomminess—where the show has to revert to the status quo—of The Good Place also came through in the final moments of season one, albeit in a more surprising way. After Eleanor announces that she figured out that The Good Place is a sham, Michael has a mini tantrum (Danson’s transformation from fidgety nice guy to devious mastermind was incredible to see), and then asks his bosses for a second chance: He wants to erase the memories of Eleanor and her doomed neighbors (even more Westworld vibes) and redesign the “Good Place” so that Eleanor never feels the need to confess, or to figure out the truth about the afterlife.

Which, naturally, sets the foundation for season two. Had the first season not been such a pleasant surprise—consistently funny and smart and engaging—the prospect of a season-two “do-over” might seem automatically stale. (And even if, heaven forfend, the show doesn’t get renewed, the finale would nonetheless have been an appropriate ending.) But The Good Place looks to be setting its sights even higher, and with any luck, it will get to continue its own grand experiment in form and storytelling for at least a couple more years. Which means more torture and emotional conflict and stomachaches and feelings of inadequacy and secret “bud holes” for Eleanor and her friends—but a lot of fun for those of us watching.

M. Night Shyamalan's Split Is a Creepy, Guilty Pleasure

To all of the shocking developments of the last 12 months, we may now add yet one more: M. Night Shyamalan has made a good movie.

Or perhaps that’s overstating it a bit. The writer-director’s latest offering, Split, is more good-bad, a B-movie that earns itself no better than a solid B. That said, given the precipitous grading curve down which Shyamalan has been slaloming for well over a decade, this is a moderately remarkable achievement.

A quick recap, for those who may have forgotten. After breaking into public consciousness with the celebrated The Sixth Sense in 1999, Shyamalan followed up with the quite-good Unbreakable, and the intriguing but not-quite-successful Signs. And then his filmmaking promptly fell off a cliff: The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening (so terrible that it necessitated inventing the “spoilereview”), The Last Airbender, and After Earth. His most recent film, 2015’s The Visit, was less awful than its predecessors and therefore widely mistaken for being good, which it wasn’t.

But now, with a very notable assist from actor James McAvoy, Shyamalan has succeeded in making a movie that’s actually worth seeing, at least for those in the proper mood. McAvoy stars as “Kevin”—or rather, as someone who was long ago known as “Kevin.” Over the subsequent years, his psyche has fractured into 23 distinct personalities, some of them more unpleasant than others.

The movie opens with one of these personalities, Dennis, abducting three high-school girls from a birthday party at a mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Two of the victims (Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula) are well-adjusted, popular girls; the third—and principal protagonist—is a loner with psychic scars of her own (Anya Taylor-Joy, from last year’s The Witch). Dennis locks them away in a windowless room and tries to indulge his penchant for watching young women dance in various stages of undress.

He is quickly reprimanded, however, by a stern woman, Patricia, who—in an ostentatious nod to Psycho—turns out to be another of Kevin’s many personalities. Off come Dennis’s glasses, on goes Patricia’s necklace and, boom!, the James McAvoy Masters Class in Acting is underway. Soon, we’ll also be introduced to Hedwig, a self-described 9-year-old boy; and Barry, a fashion designer who serves as the public face of the burgeoning menagerie.

Patricia chides Dennis for his naughty behavior with the girls, reminding him that they have been seized for another, greater purpose, at the behest of an as-yet-unseen personality. And so begins the game of cat and mice: The girls try to escape by playing the alternating trio of Dennis, Patricia, and Hedwig off one another, and Dennis/Patricia/Hedwig tries to keep them under lock and key.

In each of the “characters” McAvoy inhabits, he finds sparks of charm and wit.

Meanwhile, Barry, the “good” personality, plays his own, less malevolent cat and mouse with the psychologist and specialist in Dissociative Identity Disorder (Betty Buckley) whom he regularly visits. But the more he tries to assure her that all is well with the gang in Kevin’s head, the more he persuades her that something is going very wrong.

For its first two-thirds or so, Shyamalan keeps Split admirably creepy and well-paced, eliciting a nice performance from Taylor-Joy and solid ones from the rest of the supporting cast. (Buckley, in particular, was owed a decent role in recompense for the awful one Shyamalan saddled her with in The Happening.)

The movie falls out of kilter in the final act, however. An unsavory backstory regarding Taylor-Joy’s character that appeared to be completely unnecessary is instead revealed to be a component of the movie’s painfully Shyamalanian final twist. (Seriously, dude. Not every one of your movies needs one of these. Consider this an intervention.) Moreover, once the film’s ultimate villain is unveiled, what ought to have been a 10-minute finale is stretched to twice that. (There is, however, an unexpected Easter Egg at the end for Shyamalan aficionados.)

But the director’s strengths and weaknesses aside, it’s McAvoy’s performance(s) that elevate the film above its otherwise low-horror potential. (I was reminded of Edward Norton’s breakthrough role in Primal Fear, another B-movie elevated by an A+ split-personality performance.) In each of the “characters” McAvoy inhabits, he finds sparks of charm and wit—elements that have all too often been lacking in Shyamalan’s oeuvre. “He did awful things to people and he’ll do awful things to you, too,” the pre-adolescent Hedwig warns the kidnapped girls, before quickly adding, “I have blue socks.” And the twinkly delight that Patricia takes in a sandwich she has made for the girls—“It’s good. It’s got paprika”—is positively contagious.

Thanks largely to McAvoy, Split is easily Shyamalan’s best film since Signs, and perhaps even Unbreakable. Moreover, along with The Visit, it suggests an obvious path for him moving forward. It may be the case—indeed, it certainly looks to be—that Shyamalan will never again rediscover the elegance and control he displayed so early on in The Sixth Sense. But the world needs second-tier, quasi-guilty-pleasure entertainments, too. And with Split, Shyamalan may have finally found himself the productive niche that eluded him for so long.

The Worst Presidential Inaugurations, Ranked

With malice toward none. The only thing we have to fear. Ask what you can do for your country.

Presidential inaugurations will, at their best, inspire their audiences—not just in their respective moments, but for decades and centuries to come. But presidential inaugurations are also run by people, which means that, sometimes, they will go extremely wrong. Sometimes, it will be protests that will mar the best-planned ceremonies. Sometimes, it will be human pettiness (as when President Hoover, riding with Franklin Roosevelt in the motorcade to the Capitol in 1932, seems to have ignored Roosevelt’s attempts at conversations, instead staring stone-faced into the distance). Sometimes, however, inaugural exercises will encounter disasters of a more epic strain: storms, illness, death, extremely pungent cheese.

With that in mind, here are some of the worst inaugurations in history, ranked in order from the mildly to the egregiously disastrous.

* * *

7. John Adams, 1797

Adams is the least disastrous on this list because nothing overtly awful befell his installation as the second U.S. president. In fact, you can make a very good case—and many have—that Adams’s inauguration was one of the most pivotal moments in American history: Washington having left office after his second term was up, the installation of Adams was a demonstration of the new country’s commitment to a peaceful transition of power. It was in that sense a model of American democracy that would be emulated, with varying degrees of success, by other countries, and that should also place Adams’s inauguration on any best-inaugurations list you might want to make.

On a human level, however, the inauguration was a decidedly sad affair—especially if you happened to have the mixed blessing to be, during the ceremony that would install John Adams as president, John Adams himself. Washington exited office just as beloved as he had been when he entered it, and Americans of the time were, just as their descendants would be, extremely adept at expressing their opinions. Adams’s inauguration was thus less of a welcome to the founder and more of a farewell ceremony to Washington. After Adams took his oath, the triumphant new president was greeted with people weeping—not of joy, but of sadness.

6. George W. Bush, 2001

This one makes the list through no fault of Bush himself, but rather because of the antics of his administration’s predecessor. Bill Clinton’s staff, still angry about the Supreme Court-decided outcome of the 2000 campaign, decided to leave their successors a West Wing that doubled as a kind of bureaucratic fun house. They smeared glue on desk drawers. They rerouted the White House phone lines (in one particularly egregious rewiring, they saw to it that calls to the new chief of staff would be directed to a phone in the closet). And, according to a report on the matter from the General Accounting Office, “messages disparaging President Bush were left on signs and in telephone voice mail.” (The New York Times, in its summary of that report, added: “A few of the messages used profane or obscene language.”)

While pranks pulled from one administration to the next are typical—Clinton staffers faced similar antics from George H.W. Bush’s outgoing staff—the ones lobbed by Clinton’s team took things a step further. (As Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia—and a harsh critic of Clinton’s—told the Times: “The Clinton administration treated the White House worse than college freshmen checking out of their dorm rooms.”) The GAO estimated the cost of repairs for the damage to be between $13,000 and $14,000. Nearly $5,000 of that was dedicated to replacing the White House’s computer keyboards—from which Clinton staffers had systematically removed the “W” keys.

5. William Taft, 1909

Taft was installed when presidential inaugurations were still held in March. Despite the spring-ish timing, though, Taft’s inauguration coincided with a blizzard that covered Washington in 10 inches of snow. That in itself wasn’t too much of a problem—Taft simply took his oath of office, as Reagan would decades later, in the Senate chamber. The issue, really, was the parade that followed the oath itself. The blizzard’s winds had toppled both trees and telephone poles; trains were stalled; streets were blocked.

Still, the festivities carried on, despite 1909’s technological constraints. City workers—some 6,000 men, with 500 wagons—worked through the night to clear the parade path. In the end, the workers cleared 58,000 tons of snow from the parade route so that Taft’s carriage could pass with an appropriate amount of pomp.

Taft, for his part, bore this all with good humor. As he would later joke: “I always knew it would be a cold day in hell when I became president.”

William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt drive to the Capitol for Taft’s presidential inauguration ceremony on March 4, 1909. (George Grantham Bain Collection / Library of Congress)

4. James Buchanan, 1857

The presidency of the man many historians deem to be one of the, if not the, worst in American history began in a manner that was appropriately plagued. Before his inauguration, the soon-to-be President Buchanan stayed, along with several of Washington’s luminaries, at the National Hotel, the largest in the city. The hotel ended up being the epicenter of an outbreak of a mysterious illness. The breakout (which would come to be known as the National Hotel disease) sickened, according to some contemporary accounts, 400 people, and claimed 36 lives, including those of three congressmen.

The new president wasn’t immune from the illness: He was twice infected by it. Rumors—aided in their circulation by sensationalistic newspapers—spread that the victims of National Hotel disease had been poisoned by arsenic, and that the poisoning was the result of a botched assassination attempt on Buchanan (once called a “northern man with southern principles”) by radical abolitionists. “From every quarter of the country come in denunciations of what is styled—not without warrant,” the New York Times declared, “the determination on the part of interested parties to stifle inquiry and hoodwink suspicion concerning what has every appearance of being the most gigantic and startling crime of the age.”

Historians now think the outbreak was dysentery—a result not of conspiracy, but of the hotel’s primitive sewage system. And Buchanan himself was fortunate to have survived it. Less fortunate, however, was the nation he led once he recovered: Many historians regard his failure to treat the threat of civil war seriously as “the worst presidential mistake ever made.”

3. Andrew Johnson, 1865

To be clear, the disaster is Johnson’s inauguration not as president, but as vice president for Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s second inauguration. How did he steal the show before the inaugural address that would come to be remembered as the best in U.S. history?

Booze. Well, booze and bad luck. Johnson, when he arrived in Washington to take the oath of office, was recovering from a bout of typhoid fever. In an (apparent) attempt to self-medicate, he spent inauguration eve drinking. Come inauguration day itself, he was, unsurprisingly, hungover. And he had the misfortune of living during a time before IV-driven hangover “cures.”

So? Johnson hair-of-the-dogged. He drank, apparently, three tumblers of whiskey in his attempt to chase away the effects of the evening before. Unsurprisingly, this backfired—to the extent that, when he came to the Senate chamber to deliver his own inaugural speech, he bombed. His speech was long and rambling and angry, attesting to his “humble origins and his triumph over the rebel aristocracy.” And “in the shocked and silent audience,” according to a Senate history of the matter, “President Abraham Lincoln showed an expression of ‘unutterable sorrow,’ while Senator Charles Sumner covered his face with his hands.”

Johnson was so drunk and confused that, after he finally did sit down, he was unable to perform the day’s ceremonial task: to swear in the nation’s new senators.

Some suggested, ironically, impeachment. Lincoln, however, supported his new vice president. “It has been a severe lesson for Andy,” he said. “But I do not think he will do it again.”

2. Andrew Jackson, 1829

Jackson’s inauguration on the one hand belongs on a Best Inaugurations of All Time list, and for roughly the same reason that it makes this Worst-Of list: the massive party that followed the inauguration itself. Jackson, true to his campaign’s populist messaging, was the first president to take the oath of office in a public ceremony—one that took place outside the Capitol. A crowd of some 20,000 appeared to see him do it.

But oaths are short, and Jackie Evancho had not yet been born. What is a crowd of 20,000 to do to entertain themselves once the ceremony has ended? They made their way to the White House—where, even before Jackson came along, it was customary to have a post-inauguration reception to which people could come and shake the hand of the new president, perhaps have a glass of orange juice or a piece of cheese.

What wasn’t customary was the crowds. In the rough manner of those parties in sitcoms that kids throw when their parents are out of town, things soon got out of control. Guests’ shoes muddied the White House carpets. Soon, the crowd got rowdier. They began looting rooms. They began breaking dishes. One representative from South Carolina wrote the next day to Martin Van Buren, describing the events and dubbing the party a “Saturnalia.” The rooms of the White House would smell like the cheese that fallen onto and then been ground into the carpets for months afterward.

From the event meant to celebrate him and his presidency, Jackson had to escape, with the help of aides, through a window in the back of the White House. As for ending a party before the invention of electricity would allow you to simply turn the lights on? According to the Constitution Center, Antoine Michel Giusta, the White House steward, finally realized that the best way to get the drunken mob out of the White House was to take away its booze. Giusta moved the punch bowl outside, according to one report. “Other reports,” the Center notes, “indicated that staffers passed punch and ice cream through the White House’s windows to the crowd outside.”

To make matters worse? The wives of Jackson’s cabinet members got into a loud argument during his inaugural ball, occasioned by two of the women mean-girl-ing a third because they deemed her social standing too low and her moral standing unfit for the role of a cabinet wife. The event and its radiating effects would haunt Jackson’s entire first term, and would lead to the resignation of several of his cabinet members—including one Martin Van Buren.

Robert Cruikshank’s “President's Levee, or All Creation Going to the White House,” depicts the crowd in front of the White House following Andrew Jackson's first inaugural reception in 1829. (Library of Congress)

1. William Henry Harrison, 1841

First, Harrison delivered what was, by most accounts from listeners, a terrible, rambling speech—about Rome, about the great scope of history. It was, at 8,445 words, the longest inaugural address in history. But also: The 68-year-old delivered that speech in the cold, without a coat or a hat. He followed it up by attending a parade and then three different inaugural balls.  That speech killed him. Harrison died a month after the inauguration, of pneumonia and pleurisy.

Why Trump Is Keeping Some Obama Appointees Around

Donald Rumsfeld is not joining the Trump administration, but one of his most famous rules is: “You go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might wish you have.” Or the secretary of the Army, as the case might be.

With the process of vetting and appointing, to say nothing of confirming, executive-branch officials well behind the optimal pace, incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said during a briefing on Thursday that “over 50” members of the Obama administration will temporarily remain in their posts to help smooth the transition to the Trump administration.

Spicer did not name all of the officials, nor did he indicate whether others had been asked and declined to stay on. A message to the Trump transition team, asking for a full list, has not been answered. Reuters reported Thursday afternoon that some individuals on a list, dated Tuesday, of appointees being asked to stay on had declined to do so, including the principal deputy director of national intelligence, an undersecretary of state, and an assistant secretary of state.

Here are the people Spicer mentioned:

Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense (Work’s extension had actually already been reported.)
Chuck Rosenberg, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency
Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center
Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for public affairs
Susan Coppedge, a State Department ambassador-at-large focusing on human trafficking
Brett McGurk, State Department special envoy for combating ISIS
Kody Kinsley, assistant secretary of the treasury for management
Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence

It’s hardly novel for a president to hold some executive-branch officials over into a new administration. These cases are notable because of what else is known about the Trump transition. The president-elect has been slow to appoint officials, as my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this month. With the recent nomination of Sonny Perdue as agriculture secretary, Trump now has a full Cabinet, but below the top positions sit legions of unfilled spots. The Partnership for Public Service and Washington Post identified 690 key administration posts, of which 29 have nominees and none have been confirmed. By way of contrast, Politico notes that every one of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet members was confirmed within two days of his inauguration in 1993.

Trump has been slow to fill those slots because his transition team has been slow to identify and vet figures, which is itself partly a result of tumult on the team—Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the erstwhile head, was sacked shortly after the election—and of the fact that winning took even Trump by surprise. Several outlets reported that top Trump aides were surprised to realize that they had to replace all West Wing staff.

The profusion of empty chairs is particularly worrisome because so many Trump appointees have little or no experience in government. Among Republicans with executive-branch experience, some don’t want to work for Trump out of moral or political conviction, while others, particularly in national security, believe they are being blacklisted for opposing him during the presidential campaign.

As a result, some foreign-policy mandarins on both sides of the aisle are worried about whether the State and Defense departments are ready to face a crisis.

“Unlike State, which can rely on its bureaucracy, the NSC has to be ready on Day One as most of its old team leaves,” Philip Gordon, a former top aide to Obama, told Michael Crowley. “In a normal world, even before a single presidential phone call or meeting or decision the NSC team would prepare background, points, facts, etc. They will not have a team ready to do that.”

The conservative journalist Max Boot wrote in Foreign Policy:

Not even deputy secretaries have yet been appointed at the State or Defense departments, much less the crucial undersecretaries and assistant secretaries who are responsible for fleshing out the broad parameters of the administration’s foreign policy. These are the obscure but important officials who do the real work of governing, teeing up the decisions that will be decided by the “principals” at NSC meetings and then translating policy guidance (which in this president’s case is likely to be quite broad) into specific actions.

Keeping these officials in place is probably a wise move, then. What is intriguing about it is that many of them are working on the areas where Trump was most strident about his differences with Obama.

McGurk leads up the effort against ISIS, while Trump lambasted Obama’s handling of the group and insisted he would beat it easily and quickly. Szubin’s brief involves tracking terrorists, another area where Trump claimed the Obama team had been deficient. (Senate Republicans have bottled up his bid for his job to be made permanent on the basis that he supported Obama’s Iran deal—which Trump also blasted.) The same goes for Rasmussen. Work manages the Pentagon, while Trump spent the campaign insisting the military was a weakened mess. Shannon, although a career Foreign Service office, manages the day-to-day workings of the State Department, which Trump also claimed was being poorly run.

Keeping the 50-some officials on the job will help to produce a smoother transition that would occur without them, although the vast number of unfilled posts remains a cause for concern. But keeping them on will also likely help to preserve the policies and approach that Obama espoused.

The Poetry-Free Inauguration Makes a Comeback

Some of the most memorable inauguration moments have been because of poets: Robert Frost struggling to see what he’d written down and then improvising at John F. Kennedy’s swearing-in; Maya Angelou speaking of dinosaurs, God, and unity at Bill Clinton’s; Richard Blanco saying “hello, shalom, buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días” to Barack Obama’s second inaugural crowd.

There is no indication that Donald Trump will have a poet at his inauguration. A hoax recently circulated online saying some verses praising “Melania the fair” and calling Obama a “tyrant” would be read, but in truth there is no poet on the schedule (though, as is customary, a number of religious leaders will deliver readings).

The lack of poetry may seem like a break with precedent, or it may seem especially telling given news that Trump intends to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. But it’s not so unprecedented. Only five poets have recited their work at swearing-in ceremonies, each for Democratic presidents: Kennedy, Clinton, and Obama. (Jimmy Carter had a reading by James Dickey at an inaugural gala).

But in that fact alone—the fact of presidential poetry as a partisan tradition—is a reminder of America’s cultural divides. In the weeks after the election, many Americans turned to poetry for guidance and comfort, as my colleague Megan Garber has chronicled. Now, Leslie Lawrence at WBUR’s website suggests that anyone yearning for some verse on Inauguration Day might want to revisit the works of Walt Whitman. (From Song of Myself: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”)

Does Donald Trump have a favorite poem? If so, he doesn’t appear to have told told anyone about it publicly. The closest thing might be Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics to Al Wilson’s 1960s R&B song “The Snake.” Trump made a habit of dramatically reading the rhyme aloud on the campaign trail to describe the dangers of immigration:

A retelling of an Aesop fable, it’s about a woman rescuing a pretty snake who’s nearly been frozen to death. Once the snake has been let into her home, though, it bites her and she starts to die. “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,” it tells her, with a grin. It’s a simple work whose meaning can apply to lots of situations—but it appears that neither it nor anything like it will be heard from the U.S. Capitol on Friday.