Gaud and Country

In the summer of 2014, when Donald Trump was just sixty-eight years old, he appeared in a one-minute video that began with a shot of Trump Tower taken from the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 56th Street. The footage fades to the skyscraper’s roof, where Miss Universe and Miss USA pour Trump-branded water into silver ice buckets. A seated Trump bellows, “I’ve been called out by everybody: Homer Simpson, Mike Tyson, Vince McMahon, like, everybody’s going crazy over this. ” He then dares “President Obama, my son Donald, my son Eric” to take up the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, culminating his own under the urban sun.

On January 20, 2025, it is a frighteningly cold day, and everybody Trump referred to by name in that video knows him differently now. In that dark node of American capital, Midtown Manhattan, and indeed at Trump Tower, a pilgrimage of sorts took place as he was sworn in as #47. The building, guarded by a small NYPD detail, opened its doors at 10 a.m. to the roughly forty people waiting outside. There weren’t any metal detectors, and when a Wet Floor sign colla…