Jay Kuten: The real basket of deplorables

Jay Kuten

AS Donald Trump took the oath of office, promising to defend and protect the United States Constitution, at least half the nation was uncompromisingly angry.

For them, to borrow and remodel a phrase from the ending of the Nixon administration, a long national nightmare may be just beginning.

Nor has the new president given his opponents any reason for the optimism embodied in the notion that the office may change the man. If the past is prologue to the future, there's a lot to worry about.

A reprise of his past proven disregard of fact has been on current exhibit. He insists that the crowd that attended his inauguration was larger than any other, larger than the women's protest march against him.

While that false statement is disproved by photographic evidence, he has used a wholly contrived charge of "fake news" to attack the media. By that means he paints himself as a victim for the favour of his supporters even as he prepares to victimise those very supporters, signing executive orders that pave the way to take away their health insurance.

With Trump's record of business bankruptcies and willingness to weasel out of obligations, and his self-confessed sexual exploitations, critics can make the case that the US now has its own Silvio Berlusconi.

The concern is for the normalisation not only of misogyny and ethnic hatred but for the acceptability as normal of corruption, the very swamp of the influence of special interests he promised to clean.

We need to part the curtain around Trump's wizardry to see who is actually pulling the strings.

Before the election Trump was alleged to have offered prospective vice-presidents a significant role. He, Trump, would "run the country" as he did his businesses -- meaning to provide the branding of his name -- while the VP would do the daily grind of a chief executive, the actual work of the president.

If that scenario contains a scintilla of truth, he could not have chosen a more deliberate person than Mike Pence.

Mr Pence has been described as the most conservative vice-president candidate in the past 50 years. His model for the role of vice-president is Dick Cheney. If that, by itself, isn't enough to create cold sweat in the brows of those with temperate views, then Pence's personal ideology and his governing record consistent with that dogmatism will.

Pence has stated (and recently reaffirmed ): "I'm a Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order." Startlingly missing from that list is the word "American", a word that usually begins such listings.

Mr Pence began life as a Catholic and a Democrat. He cast off both in university and became a "born-again" evangelical Christian and a Republican. He started a career as a right-wing talk-show host and then entered politics, eventually becoming the governor of Indiana.

In Pence's short tenure of three years, his decisions, consistent with his religious biases, defunded support for health care for the poor, education through public schools, and passed the most stringent restrictions on abortion of any US state.

Now, together, with extreme right-wingers from Breitbart News and the right-wing political fixer firm of Manafort & Stone, Pence picked out a team of voracious foxes to watch over the hen houses of the cabinet.

Betsy De Vos, the nominated education secretary, doesn't believe in public education. The putative health secretary is a bitter opponent of Obamacare. Scott Pruit, the prospective environmental secretary, wants to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency.

The collective wealth of all the cabinet nominees is US$14 billion (NZ $19b). Trump claims theirs is the highest collective IQ. Yes, if that means Income Quintile.

The only bright spot of this week has been the worldwide women's march of protest against the misogyny and misanthropy of Trump's campaign and the continued dog whistles of President Trump's dark inaugural speech.

What the incoming administration needs to draw from those millions of marchers is that they and their protest are not going away any time soon.

Show your taxes, Mr Trump!

�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable