?Beware the delusions of an aggravated man. Of all the fantasies perpetrated in Donald Trump’s joyless rant of an inaugural speech, none was more preposterous than the self-casting of the man in the golden elevator as Defender of the People. The president’s crusade for Joe and Jane Sixpack will commence with an immense tax cut for the rich and, should Family Sixpack have any pre-existing health problems the insurance companies deem unviable, they will see their healthcare disappear. With friends like that?.?.?.

?The custom of inaugural speeches, as the warm-up introduction delivered by Senator Roy Blunt reminded the crowd, is uplift and reunion. Abraham Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature” in 1860 even as the republic was on the edge of civil war. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt reassured an anxious America that it had “nothing to fear but fear itself”. Ronald Reagan promised “ morning in America” after soaring inflation and the national humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis.

This president, however, sees it as his job to make sure America knows how miserable it was before his advent, even as the facts point in the opposite direction. “American carnage” might be unfolding in gangland Chicago but nationally the crime rate is the lowest it has been in decades. The economy he represents as blighted by outsourcing is in full employment and the Dow Jones is touching record highs. In Barack Obama’s second term manufacturing jobs have been coming back to America not the other way around. Those that won’t return are largely the result of automation and robotics and short of the locking up chief executives until they consent to lower productivity, they will not be coming back.