America divided ahead of the greatest show
In a week that has lurched from the bizarre to the surreal, we are now just a day away from one of the great rituals of American democracy.
And yet when Donald J Trump stands there on Capitol Hill, a few minutes before midday, and takes the oath of office, millions of people will be watching on TV and pinching themselves.
Is this really happening? How on earth did Trump become the leader of the free world?
Perhaps appropriately, if the weather forecast for Washington DC is accurate, America's 45th President will have to endure driving rain throughout his Inaugural Address.
That gloomy outlook mirrors the mood of millions of Americans. Trump has the lowest approval rating of any incoming President. Just 40 percent of Americans think he has done a good job during this tumultuous and contentious transition.
Over fifty members of Congress are refusing even to attend the ceremonies.
But we have misjudged Trump before and if we learned anything from the election campaign it was the need to escape the tiresome echo chamber of Washington and to listen to his voters in the heartland. How much patience will they have if the new President fails to deliver on his outlandish promises to bring back millions of jobs and revive dying industries?
To try and find out some answers, to understand how loyal his voters will be over the next four years, I have been travelling across America, talking to those who are wildly enthusiastic about his presidency and to those who are his fiercest critics.
If Donald Trump has a core constituency that he can rely on it is in Appalachia. This is the region that runs from Pennsylvania,through West Virginia, and on to Kentucky and Tennessee. It is the spine of America; better known as coal country.
You find here small, rugged,impoverished towns long ago forgotten by the liberal Establishment. People here embraced the Trump candidacy from the beginning with the fervor of true believers. And today, they still have his back. They call themselves Trump's foot soldiers.
In the town of Williamson in deepest West Virginia, where unemployment is high and drug addition is still higher, I sat with a group of out-of-work miners over breakfast. They told me that Trump had done something no national politician had ever done before - made them feel empowered and relevant.
Even if Trump's policies failed to revive Williamson, the President would still have the miners' support, one of the men told me. It was a real revelation. These are working-class Americans who want their jobs back, but more importantly they want their pride back.
So before we ridicule Trump and those promises of bringing the coal and steel industries roaring back, I will be thinking of these miners. They are already walking taller because of Donald Trump.
His protectionist, America-First rhetoric, mocked by outsiders, spoke directly to these unemployed West Virginians.
But if the workers of Appalachia are his greatest supporters, I also met with Americans who are in despair. To say they are distressed understates the emotional impact this election has had.
In Florida I spent an afternoon chatting to Anne Goldberg and Laura Guy, two women who compare their emotional condition to one of grief. Laura was in tears as she told me that Trump's presidency represents a national emergency, the loss of the values that made America great in the first place."This isn't a country I want to live in,"she told me. Anne suffers panic attacks when she sees Trump on television and has been forced to live in a news blackout just to get through the day.
So tomorrow will deepen America's divide, not begin to heal it.
Despite the open wound of the election, the organiser of the Inauguration has insisted he wants Friday's ceremony to have a "soft sensuality, a poetic cadence." When asked about the boycott of the event by celebrities and performers, Tom Barrack said that did not trouble him. He has, after all, the best known and most controversial celebrity in the world attending. In fact, not just attending, but being sworn in.
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