Today, We March

What’s the opposite of a miracle? “Nightmare” captures the mood, but, of course, we are awake. Debacle, perhaps. On Friday morning, we could watch, on TV, President Barack Obama taking his final moments in the Oval Office, bearing up with his usual decorum and decency, leaving the traditional letter for Donald Trump, the man who’d called him illegitimate, foreign, the founder of ISIS. On MSNBC, as Al Franken talked about Obama’s greatness and dignity, we saw images of Trump, in his red necktie, and Melania Trump, in her pale-blue coat, leaving St. John’s Church. Gray drizzle, the somewhat mournful sound of a choir, black S.U.V.s, grim security guys. Sights and sounds, and not just my mood, were funereal. Then, at the Capitol: live footage of Republicans of yore, men who’d disappeared from the scene—John Boehner, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Dick Cheney—filing in. Here was Reince Priebus; here was Jared Kushner, smirking. (If he can’t bring peace to the Middle East, who can?) The commentary on MSNBC turned to nepotism. The new President is a man whose greatest joy, not long ago, was to have people compete for his approval, on television, and to choose one and say, “You’re fired.” “It’s hard to fire your son-in-law,” Chris Matthews said. “But Mussolini had a great solution to that: he had him executed. So if I were Jared I’d be a little careful.”