What would Alistair Cooke have made of Trump's inauguration?

Margaret Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hailsham, himself half-American, once observed that the US system of government was ‘an elective monarchy with a king who rules . . . but does not reign’. The British system was ‘a republic with a hereditary life president who . . . reigns but does not rule’. And so, perhaps, it is unsurprising that the ceremony marking the beginning of the American king’s rule is more coronation than induction.

Who better than an Englishman to view this peculiarly American spectacle and pomp? Until his death in 2004, Alistair Cooke, the veteran reporter and legendary voice of the long-running radio broadcast, Letter From America, had followed every presidential election since 1936 and most of the inaugurations that followed. It was typically prescient of him to muse, in his Letter of April 1990 entitled ‘The End of the Eighties – Great or Greedy?’:

Throughout the ’80s, the non-fiction lists were headed by the autobiographies of self-made men, by titans like Lee Iacocca, the phoenix of the automobile, by Donald Trump, the young bouncy blond tycoon whose aspirations to take over hotels, casinos, airlines, resorts, cities – why not the country? – appear to be boundless.