Burn and rave?
That's not Michelle Obama's style, but it must be that of others
In the wake of World War II, Dylan Thomas wrote one of his most memorable poems. It begins: “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
When Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Monday, former First Lady Michelle Obama will not rage or rave, at least not publicly. But she also will not be on hand. Similarly, she was not in the National Cathedral for President Jimmy Carter’s funeral after protocol dictated that she sit next to Trump, something that likely turned her stomach.
Mrs. Obama will make her protest against the once and future president quietly. But her absence will resound. In its own muted way, it will echo the Pussyhat Project, the effort that brought hundreds of thousands of women to Washington after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. Fewer demonstrators are expected this time around, but tens of thousands are still likely to fill the streets.
Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, Mrs. Obama called Trump “an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures.” And remember that at the Democratic National Convention she said: "His limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be Black."
Give Mrs. Obama credit for consistency. She knows whom she loathes and she sees no reason to pretend otherwise, especially at an inauguration that happens to be slated for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As a former first lady – and not an elected official, much less a former president – she doesn’t have to make nice.
Of course, former President Barack Obama, a diplomat of the first rank, filled in the seat next to Trump’s at the funeral and they chatted amiably. That Obama likely will be on the dais with the other ex-presidents (and presumably their wives) on Jan. 20, even as the messages they hear will probably nauseate them and, perhaps, the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump either last year or in 2016.
Whether one faults Mrs. Obama or not for staying away, one must respect her courage. She is behaving far differently than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, Apple CEO Tim Cook, TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos – all sucking up to the new king.
She is taking a stand that the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, won’t take. Berman is slated to deliver the benediction on Trump’s big day, following Trump’s address.
YU “once conferred honorary degrees upon Albert Einstein, Nobel laureates, US presidents, and Israeli prime ministers — leaders who embodied the intersection of intellectual and moral excellence,” journalist Mordechai I. Twersky writes. “Yet this president’s inaugural stage is not theirs, nor is it ours. It belongs to a man whose history of divisive rhetoric and actions — against women, minorities, the press, and even Jews — stands in stark contrast to the ethical and spiritual ideals YU was founded to uphold.”
Michelle Obama’s action is reminiscent of the character Bérenger in Eugène Ionesco’s 1960 play, “Rhinoceros.” As Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor emerita at Harvard University, recently wrote in a piece for The Hill headlined “Don’t become a rhinoceros: Trump’s accession and our new theater of the absurd,” Bérenger resists turning into a rhino when everyone around him does.
At the conclusion, when he alone is still a human, he says: “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”
Normalizing Trump is not Mrs. Obama’s way. Certainly, she won’t be the last person left who won’t capitulate. There will be others, such as the legislators who have peppered Trump’s unqualified Cabinet nominees with questions of substance.
Consider Tammy Duckworth, the veteran and Senator from Illinois. She quizzed the likely next Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, on basic points, such as three different ways such secretaries negotiate national security or security treaties and he couldn’t name any. He couldn’t name any member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
“He's so focused on being a culture warrior that he is forgetting what the job is. The job is to really lead a three-million personnel organization with a budget of almost $50 billion. The man has never even led an audit. The last time that he led an organization, he led it — he so badly managed its fiscal lead that they had to bring in forensic accountants,” Duckworth said. “The bottom line is that he's not competent to lead an organization of this size. And he tried to make today's hearing about anything but the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing and would not know what he was doing as secretary of defense.”
And, despite Bezos’s kowtowing and the browbeating he’s giving The Washington Post, many journalists will hold the once-and-future president’s feet to the fire. They will include such figures as Jennifer Rubin, the former WaPo columnist who recently launched The Contrarian, an online publication that warns about the dangers of a cowed press.
“Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law,” the outlet warned. “The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.”
And they include Los Angeles Times refugee columnist Harry Litman, a former U.S. Attorney who writes the Talking Feds Substack. He recently scalded U.S. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi for her refusal to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election and her refusal to uphold the independence of the Justice Department.
Also among them are David Brooks, who recently sketched out the terrifying military challenges the U.S. faces against the united forces of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. He noted a RAND Corp. report that argued that “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.”
Brooks also pilloried some of Hegseth’s critics who failed to probe him on such weighty matters. Instead, they focused on his drinking problems and alleged sexual abuses.
“We live in a soap opera country,” Brooks wrote. “We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions.”
The thoughtful critics will include Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, who is also a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He mostly faulted the Republican senators who praised rather than probed Hegseth.
“What America and the world saw today was not a serious examination of a serious man,” Nichols wrote. “Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune.”
Hegseth’s main qualification, it seems, is that he was a Fox host whose attacks on “woke” culture apparently pleased Trump. This is a far cry from Robert McNamara, who had rebuilt and run Ford after WWII before serving as Defense Secretary throughout the 1960s. Hegseth pales beside Donald Rumsfeld, the four-term congressman who represented the U.S. in NATO and served as White House Chief of Staff, along with running several companies. Rumsfeld led the Defense Department twice, first in the 1970s and then again in the early 2000s.
Of course, Hegseth is just one part of the clown Cabinet and adviser group Trump is assembling. This group includes HHS Secretary-nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vax conspiracy theorist; Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence and a fan of exiled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 contributor slated to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump appears to have assembled his team based not on their qualifications, but on their obeisance to him. He doesn’t want any independent folks, such as retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff who called him a “fascist” and “the most flawed person” he’s ever known or retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who warned that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Let’s not forget that Trump’s posse includes Musk, the erratic supporter of a far-right German party who is teaming up with other billionaires to attack the U.S. government in Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and his cronies are at the core of what outgoing President Biden warned about in his farewell address, cautioning about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”
“Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said.
In that, the president borrowed a page from The New Yorker. In “The Inauguration of Trump’s Oligarchy,” editor David Remnick wrote of Trump: “He will return to the Oval Office with a résumé enhanced by two impeachments, one judgment of liability for sexual abuse, and a plump cluster of felony convictions. He will take the oath of office next week at the scene of his gravest transgression, his incitement of an insurrection on Capitol Hill. Still, Trump soldiers on, as if all the legal accusations against him are badges of merit, further proof of his anti-establishment street cred.”
Trumpers, of course, ignore such failings or, thanks to their paucity of reliable news sources, are ignorant of them.
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” President Biden added in a worrying note about the press. “The free press is crumbling [or] disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit…. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”
In the future, he said, “it’s going to be up to the president…, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces.”
As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson noted, Biden’s warning “will stand alongside other prescient warnings outgoing presidents have delivered, like President George Washington famously warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements, and President Dwight Eisenhower warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
Richardson, too, will be among those who are sure to call out Trump’s abuses and follies.
Perhaps those who will be most scorching in coming years will be comedians. Jimmy Kimmel, for instance, has already taken Trump to task for prodding officials to raise flags to full staff for the inauguration, suspending the 30-day half-staff status in honor of Carter. “Trump threw such a tantrum about it, Speaker Mike Johnson ordered all U.S. flags in the Capitol to fly at full-staff on inauguration day for Donald Trump,” Kimmel told his audience. “Which might be the most Donald Trump-y thing Donald Trump has ever done, to be mad that a guy who just died is getting all the attention.”
Michelle Obama’s silent protest befits a woman who famously prefers to take the high road when others go low. Her empty chair will say a lot. Over the coming four years, however, others will have to raise their voices higher if American democracy, a beacon to the world, is to escape its close of day.
Marsha (if I may), thanks for taking note.
JW
Steve, thanks for taking note. I hope all is well with you and yours. Belated best wishes for the new year.