Will Trump remember his allies?

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and behind them the Clintons shrank in their places, like captives paraded in ancient Rome after a military triumph. I experienced contradictory reactions. On the one hand, I felt a surge of joy that an American president at last has the confidence to do obviously right things – control the southern border, get out of the Paris Agreement, exploit America’s huge reserves of oil and gas, create a situation in which ‘You’ll be able to buy the car of your choice’, remove all social and ethnic engineering from government policy, replacing it with one that is ‘colour-blind and merit-based’ and assert the existence of only two genders in same, stop public education which teaches pupils to hate their country, leave the World Health Organisation and, yes, restore to Denali in Alaska its former American name of Mount McKinley. All of the above may be controversial but come under the category President Trump himself employed of ‘common sense’. How did the world’s greatest nation ever stray from such sensible things? Why did the world have to wait for a right-wing white president to restore the idea of Martin Luther King that people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character?