Say this much for Washington: The Swamp knows how to do pageantry. Beginning on Thursday afternoon at Arlington National Cemetery, the solemn and joyful rituals of a presidential inauguration overwhelmed the clown show — on Capitol Hill, where brickbats aimed at Trump’s cabinet nominees left marks mainly on the Democrats who hurled them, and on the streets, where the radical Left’s tantrums couldn’t even sour the mood, much less spark the revolution.
As Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States, American pride in peaceful transfers of power, so historically remarkable, seemed to melt away the rancor. Self-absorbed House Democrats who skipped the proceedings — confounding a celebration of America with an endorsement of a president they reject ex ante — rendered themselves invisible beyond their intentions.
None of us should be naïve. For Americans, the inauguration of a new president is a “we hit life’s lottery” moment. We could, after all, have been born in Bentiu or Helmand or Aleppo. But it is just a moment. We can hope we draw strength from it, and patriotic resolve to remember what unites us. Then we go back to the bitter divisions of our day-to-day.
In the two and a half months since President Trump’s stunning victory on November 8, speculation over how he would manage those divisions — or pour more gasoline on them — has dominated the public debate. That is to be expected. It has been an anxious interregnum: one presidency winding down, unconstrained by political concerns and unabashed about its inner radicalism; a new presidency in waiting, making a splash here and there but powerless to direct policy.
Much of the speculation is idle. Yes, there are matters of enormous consequence before us, the collapse of Obamacare perhaps the most immediate. But presidencies are never judged by what is on the president’s desk when he first enters the Oval Office. Donald Trump’s presidency will be judged by things that haven’t happened yet, by how he reacts to events, especially the unexpected — the Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the 9/11.
Neither success nor failure is guaranteed. In the here and now, what matters is whether the new president is setting himself up for success — and, more important, setting the country on a path to security whatever may come.
So, let’s talk security.
In his ambitious inaugural address, President Trump vowed that the United States would “eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” That is ambitious, to say the least. What we call “radical Islam” is not so radical on much of the earth. What makes it “radical” here in the West is the subject of dispute. According to Washington, it is the practice of violent jihadism. For those with eyes willing to see, though, it is the ideology that animates the jihad: the belief in a divine mission to implement sharia — Allah’s law and blueprint for how life is to be lived, as classically understood for more than a millennium.