Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025

The human propensity for absurdity is perhaps our most enduring quality.

This was on full display today in the nation’s capital, as the frothing masses gathered to anoint Donald J. Trump for his second term as president. It was less a ceremony than a séance, a convocation of the spiritually dispossessed who believe they have seen salvation in the form of a spray-tanned real estate magnate. The man who once declared he would be remembered as a healer has returned, not as the doctor of the nation’s ills but as its undertaker, garbed in the trappings of false glory and surrounded by a congregation of the duped, the desperate, and the deluded.

The weather was suitably bleak—a steady sleet that plastered red hats to thinning hairlines and turned poster board slogans into damp, illegible smears. Yet the faithful came, their spirits unbowed, for this was no ordinary political rally. It was a pageant of grievance, a festival of victimhood dressed in the gaudy colors of patriotism. Here they were, the forgotten men and women, standing in line for hours to be metaphorically spat upon by their savior, who would not endure five minutes of their company without recoiling in visible disgust. But such is the nature of devotion: it demands humiliation as proof of sincerity.

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