Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, the singer and actor Randy Rainbow has been posting ingenious, funny videos on YouTube, satirical versions of familiar songs featuring elaborate costumes and snappy electronic effects, on political subjects including Trump’s retreat during the Black Lives Matter protests (Bunker Boy) and the possibility of his eventual incarceration (The Trump Cell Block Tango.)
On the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, a friend texted me Randy Rainbow’s newest, Seasons of Trump. In a chorus line, wearing a range of bright comical outfits, Randy and his video avatars count the 2,102,400 minutes that Donald Trump was in office, the 1,460 days, the 11, 780 votes he said he needed. Randy rhymes the nonstop offenses: the lies, the tweets, the fake news, the Hollywood Access tape, the porn stars, the racism, Covid, the Russians. The insurrection. “In Muellers, in red hats, in words he can’t spell?/ How will you remember four years stuck in hell?”
I’ve always enjoyed these little films. But this was the first time that Randy Rainbow made me burst into tears. Hearing him, I was painfully aware of all those minutes, those days, of how frightening it had been, how long it had lasted, how much I had steeled myself to endure, to accept – and how relieved I was that it was over.
I’m not someone who cries easily, nor am I a big fan of waving flags and patriotic ceremonies. But tears welled again during the twilight memorial service honoring the 400,00 Americans who have died of Covid-19, and again the next day when I watched Joe Biden’s grandkids walk down the same steps that the rioters swarmed up, intent on murder, two weeks before. The last time I felt this way was right after 9/11, wandering around my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, weeping. But the 9/11 attack took a few terrifying hours, the story emerged over the next few days. Donald Trump’s presidency lasted four years, or as Randy Rainbow notes, for more than two million unrecoverable minutes.
Whatever one thinks of Joe Biden, there’s no doubt that the mood, the tone, and the content of the January 20 ceremony was very unlike the 2016 Inauguration. Our new president isn’t obsessed with the size of his adoring crowd; there was no crowd. The faces on the podium were notably more diverse than in years before. It would have been impossible not to be moved by Kamala Harris’s choice, for her security escort, of Eugene Goodman, the brave, quick-thinking Capitol policeman who essentially saved the US Senate. That fact we have a half-Black, half-Asian woman vice president made me hope that our country might become a more welcoming place for my biracial grandchildren. The vibrant, regal young poet Amanda Gorman and the eloquent Rev Silvester Beaman reminded us of the beauty of oratory, and Lady Gaga achieved the impossible, making us listen closely to (and appreciate the relevance of) an anthem we’d mostly stopped hearing.
The speeches stressing unity, conciliation, community and compassion were heartfelt and reassuring, but they wouldn’t have seemed so startling if it hadn’t been so long since we’d heard anything like that from our leaders. And the ceremony might have been less powerful if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, if we hadn’t spent months knowing that we were suffering and dying and no one was taking charge or even admitting what was happening.
I remember the night Obama was elected; it was like a huge party blowing through the streets of New York City. The fact that his term was followed by Donald Trump’s has made me wary of long-term optimism. I know there were people watching the Inauguration who won’t readily trade their rage for open-heartedness just because Joe Biden think it’s a good idea, and others who weren’t as thrilled as I was when J-Lo broke into Spanish, acknowledging a simple truth: we live in a multilingual country. I’m still worried about the things that alarmed me before: the environment, racism, health care, misogyny, gender discrimination, income inequality, mass incarceration, the likelihood that the pandemic will get worse before it gets better … the list goes on.
But for now, just for now, it feels great. It feels like someone is in charge, someone in touch with reality. Someone who cares about the rest of the world, who wants things to get better, who thinks of something – anything – other than himself. Someone who speaks, as Joe Biden did, about leading “not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.” Someone who hugs his wife. Someone who isn’t heartless: I would have settled for that.
That might seem like setting the bar awfully low, but it’s the difference between life and death, between the survival of our nation and the death spiral into which our democracy was headed. During the inauguration, I kept recalling the comforting jingle that Spanish-speaking families say when children hurt themselves: sana, sana, colita de rana/ Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana. Heal, heal little frog’s tail/If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow. It’s meant to be reassuring, and it is: if our country doesn’t get better today, let’s hope it will tomorrow.
It’s almost as if the last four years have been a mad science experiment to see if we could still function as our supply of oxygen was steadily reduced. And now it’s as if a clean wind is blowing through our nation. We can’t take off our masks yet, but now, just for now, we can breathe.
Francine Prose is a novelist. Her new book The Vixen is out June 2021