Trump has painted a disturbing picture of the American present. He has described this country as reaching a 47-year-high of murder rates (it hasn’t); he has described China as “Raping” our country when it comes to trade, and he has formed a call to action based on mending the divisions in our country through “A new national pride”. Unfortunately, Trump’s first few weeks in office have done nothing to mend our divisions – unless you count uniting the formerly embattled leftists against him. His actions have only seemed to embarrass our nation, weaken our credibility, and undermine our institutions. Since the first day he took office, the world has witnessed an international spectacle as Trump, a fat old man armed with a 6th grade vocabulary and a spineless Republican Congress, lurched from day to regretful day.

Witnessing his Inauguration first hand wasn’t particularly rousing, but rather depressing. The event itself was rainy, a little muddy, and the 1.5 million people in attendance seemed closer to a third of that. The speeches by Roy Blunt and Chuck Schumer flew by, as did Pence’s squinty-eyed acceptance, but Trump seemed to slow everything down. His speech, which many hoped would represent a tempering of his agenda, was a fiery dismissal of the establishment and harked a return to rule by the people for the people. Except for the millions more who voted for Hillary over Trump, this event was not for them. In reality his speech represented something far different, it represented his vision of the world and our place in it.

Trump’s vision of the world is that of winners or losers, the strong or the weak. He has, in his mind, the understanding that “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first”. It is this understanding that motivates him, America was not great when America was helping the population – but it can be great, it need only throw off its shackles of responsibility. It is only through this that “American can start winning” that America can be great, wealthy, strong, proud. For Donald Trump, America can only win when it is in first place, and so from this day onward it must be “only America first, America first”. He views himself as the deliverer of this great providence, the “voice” of the American people and the liberator of the “forgotten man and the forgotten women” from a corrupt system that put the needs of the world before the people of this country. In an effort to impress his audience, the assembled masses of the nation, he invoked long dead men who had lifted America closer and closer to world power, borrowing the “Forgotten Man” from FDR and hinting at Theodore Roosevelt’s new nationalism. Regretfully, Trump is not a great man, he isn’t FDR, Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln, or George Washington; he merely wants to be.

However, Trump also made a commitment to us, the people who populate this nation. He stated that he “will never let you down”, he will “fight for you with every breath in his body”. Trump is now past his second vacation to Florida since he took office a few weeks ago. He is vacationing from a near endless onslaught of resistance from the people of this country as he attempts to accomplish a massive agenda, which has and will continue to stretch the capacity of executive power in this nation. The view that Donald Trump has of America as it stands in a state of “carnage” is a view that could very well shape the country and the world irreversibly. We must hold Trump and his appointees accountable for their actions and we must fight to ensure that they fight for us. Thus far, Trump has shown a disregard for the voices of the American people and a disregard for the institutions and ethics that guard us from tyranny. We have to question how far Trump is willing to take his predatory worldview, and unfortunately, we may find out.