The presidency began with a lie.
President Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a man having transformed from laughingstock to the most powerful man on the planet in five short years, woke up on January 21, 2017, in the White House. Here was a man who cared about status and power above all else, and on a blustery Saturday morning in Washington, Trump stirred early at the world’s most famous address, a place he now called home. He had done it.
He woke up angry.
Trump had long been an obsessive cable TV watcher, a habit that only accelerated once he became president, despite the demands of the office. And it was fitting, in a way, that his TV fixation played a role in his very first full day in office. It would be far from the last.
The news on January 21 was, of course, wall-to-wall coverage of the new commander in chief. Trump had, again, achieved his ultimate goal of being the center of conversation, the name on everyone’s lips. But what the anchors were saying—and displaying—infuriated him.
The hosts that day were showing photos of the National Mall and the crowd that fanned out from the US Capitol’s west steps, where Trump had delivered his sixteen-minute inaugural address: dark, almost dystopic remarks, quickly dubbed the “American Carnage” speech after a stunningly bleak line that prompted former president George W. Bush to deem the whole thing some “weird shit.”
The crowd was sizable. But it was not nearly as large as the one that had...
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