While all presidential inaugurals have enough historical value and pomp and circumstance to attract viewers lucky enough to have the day off from work, these stately ceremonies mostly go off without much drama or storyline behind them. You get a chance to hear what the new president intends to do over the next four years, but most viewers already have a pretty good idea of what a President Trump intends to do while in the White House. For those more interested in the fashion of the ceremony, you can see what kind of dress Melania will be wearing and find out who designed it. It certainly wasn’t Tom Ford.
With Trump’s inaugural tomorrow, there’s growing anticipation that more than a few showing up for the occasion may be more interested in disrupting the event as a way of protesting his presidency. How large these groups will be and how they will express their dissatisfaction with a Trump presidency is anyone’s guess.
But crowds can be unpredictable. Once assembled they can quickly mutate from being a large group of peaceful protestors carrying placards to a violent rabble. It is something organizers should keep in mind as they continue to send out their tweets and other recruiting messages through social media. These organizers may build a large, diverse crowd, which is fine, but hopefully they will not attract the wrong kind of protester–the kind that likes to agitate a relatively peaceful crowd into a violent mob.
With several congressional members planning to boycott Trump’s inaugural, and some even saying he is not a legitimate president, the atmosphere in D.C. will be more than just a little bit contentious. Mobilizing a large crowd to show up in such a volatile environment is certainly not without some risk. Studies have shown that crowds take on a personality of their own, regardless of how well behaved the individual members of a crowd may be. While the individual members of a crowd may all be law abiding and well behaved, the crowd they belong to can exhibit an entirely different personality, even a violent one.
If political and cultural leaders are claiming that Trump is not our legitimate president, then some of the more easily-provoked and less-reflective members of the crowd may deem that as justification for more aggressive action. After all, if Trump is not legitimate, then he somehow cheated his way all through the primaries and general election and is on the verge of stealing the most powerful office in the world. He will have stolen the country from the people.
Such thinking, fueled by the belief that Trump is not legitimate, can ultimately lead some of the weaker-minded elements of the crowd to believe that such a travesty must be met with more forceful and potentially violent protests.
Getting a large crowd to believe that their very country has been stolen by a New York conman who has no right to take over the presidency is a dangerous game. It turns a political protest into a moral crusade, one mobilized, not by a difference in political opinion or policy, but by hatred of a single man, one who has, quite literally, according to those calling him illegitimate, stolen our Democracy.
Sending a crowd into the streets with that provocative and incendiary belief coursing through their minds is certainly not a risk I would want to take. But perhaps some of those organizing these protests are unable to understand just how dangerous it is to tell their followers that an incoming president illegitimate. Call him inexperienced, misguided, dishonest, incapable, even a Russian stooge, but claiming he did not legally and fairly win the presidency raises the risk of chaos and violence. It also makes us sound more like Gambia than the United States.
The irony, of course, was that it was Trump, the candidate the corporate media expected to lose by a huge margin, being asked in one of this debates with Clinton if he would accept the results of the election, not the 70 House Democrats planning on boycotting the inauguration.
