SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Michael Koziol
Washington: Hillary Clinton held it together while Donald Trump claimed to be a peacemaker and a unifier, plugged his promised Department of Government Efficiency and pledged to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas.
But when he repeated his undertaking to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, it proved too much for the former first lady, who burst into laughter in the second row.
And you had to laugh, really, as Trump flagged his plan to “take back” the Panama Canal, claimed the Chinese military was running it, and said it was America’s manifest destiny to plant the Stars and Stripes on the moon.
The latter prompted a Cheshire grin from billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk, sitting a few seats away from Trump in the Capitol Rotunda, who gave a goofy two thumbs up to a nearby camera.
Trump’s second inauguration ran the spectrum from amusing to awkward and downright unhinged – and you wouldn’t have expected anything less.
Melania Trump, whose public frostiness, especially toward her husband, is a source of constant amusement, provided early laughs when her wide-brimmed Eric Javits boater hat blocked Trump from reaching her cheek when he leant in for a kiss.
As the newly sworn-in president thundered about “betrayal” and promised to liberate Americans from their nation’s decline, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sat stone-faced in the front row behind him, rarely joining the Republican faithful in applause or standing ovation.
Only when Trump spoke about the ceasefire in Gaza, for which he again seemed to take credit, did Biden and Harris stand and clap – but not before the outgoing president shot his deputy an awkward glance that said: “I suppose we have to do this, don’t we?”
Country singer Carrie Underwood got her own dose of the awkwards when the backing track for America the Beautiful failed to start playing.
After Underwood was introduced, the room waited in silence for nearly two minutes until an official approached her, and she said: “I can just sing it.” She did so a cappella, and sounded great.
(It just shows no event is too big or important for technical gremlins to rear their heads. Those with a fondness for such glitches might remember the 1996 National Tree Lighting ceremony where Patti LaBelle was forced to butcher her way through This Christmas without a teleprompter or backing singers, in front of then-president Bill Clinton.)
But it was Trump’s second speech of the day, to dignitaries, donors and supporters in an overflow room in the Capitol, that flicked the switch to vaudeville.
Unchained from formalities and protocols, and unscripted, the president went into stand-up comedy mode, telling the room they were “a younger, far more beautiful audience than the one I just spoke to”.
He lamented that he thought he “blew it” by ordering the inauguration indoors for fear of cold weather.
President Donald Trump speaks in Emancipation Hall after the 60th Presidential Inauguration.Credit: AP
After all, the sun was shining in Washington. “Then I went outside, and we were freezing,” he said. “You would have been very unhappy. The sun is very deceptive.”
The wind was blowy, and when seeing Biden off in the Marine One chopper, Melania’s hat was caught in the updraught. “She almost blew away, we almost lost her,” Trump said. “She was being elevated off the ground.”
We were informed the first lady and Vice President J. D. Vance counselled Trump to exclude some “extremely controversial” things from his official inauguration speech, such as his promise to pardon the January 6 rioters and a long list of familiar grievances about Nancy Pelosi, the Biden administration, the media and voter fraud.
Trump proceeded to rant and ramble about all of those matters, and repeated his false claim the 2020 election was “totally rigged”. There was a long, digression-filled tribute to Texas governor Greg Abbott, who was in the audience, and another round of jabs at “the fake news” and political pollsters.
All the while, Vance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and others stood awkwardly on stage, Johnson with his hands in his pockets and eyes frequently on the floor. “Four years of this,” his face seemed to say.
Melania and Vance’s wife Usha had taken seats; Trump later said the first lady’s feet were aching in her high heels.
Trump spoke in the overflow room for just over half an hour; a few minutes longer than his official inaugural address. Meanwhile, a split screen on CBS showed that in the time Trump was speaking, Biden had landed at Andrews Air Force Base, given a farewell speech, boarded a 747 and taken off for California.
The new president, however, was proud of his efforts. “I think this was a better speech than the one I made upstairs,” Trump told the overflow crowd. “I gave you the A-plus treatment.”
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