‘I could be sitting at the front row at an award show and I still don’t feel like a cool kid.’
– A 22-year-old Taylor Swift, already a superstar well along her path to world dominion
Threaded through this past momentous January week, amid the grand pomp of an American inauguration, the peaceful handover of power, the breathless flurry of executive orders, the debates over pardon limits, the frigid temperatures, the euphoria and the dysphoria within the United States populace, the prayers, and the partying, there have been a few peculiar memes about Donald Trump’s new status.
Not as the 47th (and 45th) POTUS, not as a fella with a mandate and mojo to spare, not as a former/current leader returning to the Oval Office with newfound clarity and purpose.
The topic: Is Donald J. Trump cool? And, relatedly, can he be considered, at last, a full-fledged, fully accepted, member of the American president’s club, a club so exclusive there are only four other living members, and only 45 members in total, since 1789?
Trump certainly was not uniformly greeted as a worthy colleague when he first took office in 2017, following his shock and awe defeat of more than a baker’s dozen of top tier Republican contenders and his epic vanquishing of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton dynasty.
The snide and dismissive remarks from bold-faced politicians and celebrities, the mocking of Trump’s credentials as a potential policy maker and self-appointed sage, continued throughout the campaign season, well beyond 2016’s Election Day, and all the way through his first term in office.
Barack and Michelle Obama themselves remained stony-faced as they handed over the metaphorical White House keys, and had nary a kind word during the run of Trump’s first administration. Admittedly, the Obama-Trump chronicle had started on a cruel and sour note, with Trump’s accusations about Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy, and both sides trading insults and expressions of mutual disdain.
(Example 1: Obama on Trump, insisting voters would never elect Trump in 2016 because they knew ‘that being president is a serious job… It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing, it’s hard. It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.’ Example 2: Trump on Obama: ‘He’s a terrible president. He’ll probably go down as the worst president in the history of our country. He’s been a total disaster.’)
Trump, meanwhile, never expected to be accepted by the president’s club when he took office in 2017, and said as much. In any case, he was busy with the big job, its tasks huge and unfamiliar even for a global icon who had, at least on the surface, achieved massive success with nearly every new professional venture, from real estate magnate to best-selling author to blockbuster television star.
Whether one considers Trump’s first White House go-round impressive, disastrous, or somewhere in between, it was unquestionably shambolic, dominated by a cult of personality and punctuated by wild Trump tweets, in-house melodrama, and unceasing national nitpicking. The confusion and ugliness of the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, served as an apposite sendoff to Trump’s chaotic, polarizing term.
