RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘You’re so vain, you prolly think this march is about you,” read a sign at Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. I thought to myself: This is about him, isn’t it?

I put that question to Breanne Butler, the march’s global coordinator, who insisted the answer was no: “This isn’t a march on Trump,” she said. “It’s a march on Washington,” including Congress, the Supreme Court and “any other representatives.” The message, according to Ms. Butler: “Hear our voices, we’ve been silenced. You need to take us into consideration. . . . We are America.”

That sounded a lot like the message voters were sending when they made Donald Trump president: They felt marginalized and voiceless. Ms. Butler, a 27-year-old New Yorker on sabbatical from her job as a pastry chef, said she hopes progressives and Trump voters can acknowledge their differences and find common ground, although she later called Mr. Trump’s election “a symptom of a bigger disease,” namely “complacency.”

Complacency didn’t seem to be a problem for the self-proclaimed “nasty women”—and men—who made the pilgrimage to the capital. They numbered perhaps half a million. And if Ms. Butler’s title, global coordinator, seemed grandiose for a march “on Washington,” it wasn’t. She had a hand in organizing more than 600 marches in every state and on all seven continents—yes, even Antarctica.

In Mr. Trump’s hometown, an estimated 400,000 people marched down Second Avenue. Women in Japan marched for higher education; in Ethiopia, for clean water. The Antarctic march took place aboard a boat.

The marchers in Washington seemed to have a million messages. One big theme was reproductive rights. “Get your policies out of my exam room,” read one sign defending Planned Parenthood. Others read “Save ACA, live long, and prosper,” “My body my business,” and “Reproductive rights are human rights.” Many women carried signs depicting the female anatomy or wore crocheted pink cat ears—a pun on a vulgar term Mr. Trump once uttered.

There were plenty of other pet causes. “Racial justice = LGBTQ issues,” read one sign. A popular poster featured a woman in an American-flag hijab and the words “We the people are greater than fear.” Forty-year-old Pablo Rosa, who immigrated to the U.S. when he was 13, carried a sign that said “Mexico owes US nothing.” Other posters called Mr. Trump “the Kremlin candidate” and “Putin’s pawn,” pleaded to “protect our planet,” and proclaimed: “Public education is a civil right.”

The mood on Saturday was upbeat—surprisingly so, given the divisions that emerged during the march’s planning. Leading up to the march several posts on the organization’s social media pages erupted in controversy. ShiShi Rose, a social media administrator for the march, wrote an Instagram post titled “White Allies Read Below.” She instructed that “no ally ever got very far without acknowledgment of their privilege daily” and informed white women that they “don’t just get to join because you’re scared too. I was born scared.”

The comments exploded. “This makes me not want to go now,” one woman wrote. “This is all for all women! Not just black, white but brown, Muslim etc.” Another observed that “women were suppressed throughout history. This is an event about women banding together, not tearing each other apart because you’re bitter.”

When I asked Ms. Butler about such exchanges, she said they had concerned her initially. But after reading one of the posts, she concluded its author had a point: “We aren’t taking your history into consideration, and we need to.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump made a smart move in visiting the CIA on his first full day on the job, but he and his staff are going to have to raise their game if they want to succeed at governing. This was not a presidential performance.

The visit made sense to repair any misunderstandings from the campaign and transition when Mr. Trump sometimes seemed to attack the entire intelligence community for the leaks that Russia tried to help his campaign. Those leaks were almost certainly put out or authorized by the Obama White House or senior intelligence officials appointed by President Obama. The rank and file didn’t do it.

“I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country towards making us safe, towards making us winners again,” Mr. Trump told employees assembled in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall for those have died in the covert service. “I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job, and we’re going to start winning again and you’re going to be leading the charge.” So far so good.

But Mr. Trump also couldn’t resist turning the event into an extended and self-centered riff about the size of his campaign rallies, the times he’s been on Time magazine’s cover and how the “dishonest” media misreported his inaugural crowds. He all but begged for the political approval of the career CIA employees by suggesting most there had voted for him.

Such defensiveness about his victory and media coverage makes Mr. Trump look small and insecure. It also undermines his words to the CIA employees by suggesting the visit was really about him, not their vital work. The White House is still staffing up, but was it too much to ask National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s staff to write up five or 10 minutes of formal remarks that had something to do with the CIA?

I watched U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on TV in Israel, alternating ‎between Hebrew- and English-speaking channels, so as not to miss any detail or piece of ‎commentary.‎

The buildup to the momentous event had been dramatic. Until late in the race, it ‎appeared that Hillary Clinton was going to strut away with the Democratic nomination ‎and beat Republican candidate John McCain with one hand tied behind her back.‎

Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, an unknown senator from Illinois emerged and ‎proceeded to crush her vision of re-entering the White House as its master, not simply first lady.‎

Mrs. Bill Clinton was understandably livid to see the effect that Obama had on her party ‎and its supporters. Not only was he everything she was not: tall, dark, handsome and ‎charismatic; he also outranked her in minority status. She may have had hopes of ‎becoming the first woman to occupy the Oval Office. But he was black.‎

In addition, though Clinton had a political record that could be critiqued — and a spouse ‎whose blatant infidelities led to his impeachment, but not to her divorcing him — Obama ‎possessed a picture-perfect nuclear family and no visible blemishes on his enigmatic past.‎

Both had been Saul Alinskyites in their youth, but Clinton had long since sold her ‎radicalism to the highest bidder, exchanging ideology for financial opportunism and ‎power lust. Obama, on the other hand — considerably younger than his rival — was still in ‎the throes of his late mentor’s teachings. ‎

For Clinton, America’s greatness and abundance were there for exploitation. Obama ‎viewed the country and its institutions as a lump of unappealing clay he was anointed to ‎pummel and remold in his image. His motto of “hope and change” disguised this agenda, ‎but it invigorated a disgruntled public hungry for Utopia. Neither Clinton nor McCain ‎stood a chance.‎

When Obama was sworn in — his hand disturbingly on the Bible whose passages he had ‎spent 20 years hearing in sermons preached by his anti-American, anti-white and anti-‎Semitic pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright — I longed to join in the festivities. ‎

Indeed, it was a truly historic occasion for a country in which segregation was still ‎practiced in my lifetime, to be electing a black president. As cameras zoomed in on Oprah ‎Winfrey weeping tears of joy, I wanted to join her. I wished to be cheering, rather than ‎mourning what I anticipated was going to be a concerted effort to destroy the great ‎United States from within and appease its external enemies to the point of endangering ‎Israel.‎