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The day before Donald Trump's inauguration as president of the United States an actual event taking place in the universe we live in news broke that his administration plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. And I wanted to scream.

This is Donald Trump's America: one where things like art and books and science and learning and thoughtful consideration of complicated problems are deemed worthless and tossed aside. This can't be surprising after the Trump we saw on the campaign trail, the man who never answered a question with a hint of intelligence or depth. In an interview this week, he couldn't name a single book he's reading. He's appointed a secretary of education who wants to destroy public schools. He reportedly offered a notorious anti-vaccination activist a position leading a commission investigating vaccines. He called global warming a Chinese hoax.

Of course he's getting rid of the NEA and the NEH. What use does Donald Trump have for the things that make life beautiful and good? He surrounds himself with gilded ugliness. He's a billionaire who hangs a Renoir reproduction in the $100 million abattoir he lives in, because why would he want an original? He has enough money and fame to access to the finest tailors in the world, and his suits don't fit. His hair is stupid.

I know, I'm petty. I'm a snob. I'm a liberal elitist, and elitist liberal snobbery is why Trump won. You know what? I don't care. I'm tired of shouldering the burden of cultural empathy when no one asks the folks who voted for the racist, misogynist manbaby to take two damn seconds to consider the moral implications of putting an ignorant pussy-grabber into the most powerful job on the planet.

We have a president who doesn't read books. He doesn't read books. Even George W. Bush read books, and he still managed to destroy the economy and entangle us in two unwinnable wars. What horrors will Trump visit upon the nation and the world? How will he change America for the worse?

Of course Donald Trump wants to destroy the government's (frankly meager) efforts to promote the humanities and the arts. It's not just that those things have never made the slightest impact on his life. (Imagine having a thoughtful discussion with Donald Trump about a piece of art. A painting. A song. A poem.) The arts and humanities are tools for getting at the truth of things. Trump hates the truth. He drapes himself in comforting lies about everything from the size of his hands to the size of his Electoral College victory. He doesn't just lie constantly, he labels the truth a lie, the tellers liars.

We won't fund public art programs, but we'll have Breitbart in the White House briefing room. We won't fund historical preservation projects or cultural explorations, but the president will attack journalists on Twitter.

Trump doesn't have plans to make America great again; he's going to remake America in his own image. He thinks art means plaster statues of eagles that look like they came out of SkyMall. He thinks news comes from Morning Joe and Fox & Friends. He separates books into two categories: those with his face on the cover and those without. (He doesn't read either kind.)

Trump doesn't represent a shift to the right; this is more cataclysmic than a simple change of party. Donald Trump represents the dark side of human nature: ugliness, ignorance and fear. He wants to build a giant wall, an act contrary to the idea of art. He won on the promise of banning a religion from immigrating, a rejection not just of an entire culture but of the idea of culture itself.

This is our new president: a man who revels in rejecting truth and anything that helps us find it. He wants to make America look more like him. We can't let that happen.

More than 50 House members,representing more than 10 percent of Congress, have said they'll skip this week's festivities.

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Welcome to Donald Trump's Ignorant America - RollingStone.com

Vice President-elect Mike Pence walks through the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Carolyn Kaster/AP hide caption

Vice President-elect Mike Pence walks through the halls of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Shortly before Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Friday, Mike Pence will put his hand on Ronald Reagan's Bible and be sworn in as vice president. It's a job that has varied in influence from administration to administration. So how will Pence cut his path?

It was clear from the day he was introduced as Donald Trump's pick for vice president that Mike Pence came second. Trump took a full 30 minutes to introduce Pence, but he spent most of that time talking about himself and his Democratic rival, before ending with a story about how Pence endorsed another candidate in the Republican primary.

"So even though he was under pressure, cause I'm so outside of the establishment it was the single best nonendorsement I've had in my life," said Trump.

In Washington, D.C., this week, Pence recalled getting invited to join the ticket:

"When the phone call came that night at the Indiana governor's residence and that familiar voice came across the phone line, and he said, 'Mike, I've got an assignment for you and it's going to be great.' And I can testify that it has been."

Already they've proved to be an odd couple stylistically, with Trump turning to cable news or Twitter to say what he's thinking, and Pence coming in behind to calm, clarify or just clean up.

There was the time Trump tweeted at the "overrated" cast of Hamilton for delivering a message to Pence at the end of a performance.

Meanwhile, Pence was on CBS praising the musical and downplaying the kerfuffle. "I wasn't offended by what was said," Pence said. "I'll leave it to others to determine whether it was the appropriate venue to say it."

And recently Trump warned congressional Republicans in a series of tweets to be careful as they moved to repeal Obamacare, moments before Pence met with those very Republicans.

In a press conference afterward, Pence seemed to translate Trump's tweets into congressional speak. "Step 1 will be to repeal Obamacare," he said. "But as the president-elect said today, and I admonished members of the House Republican conference today, it is important that we remind the American people of what they already know about Obamacare, that the promises that were made were all broken."

Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling became friends with Pence when they served in the House of Representatives together. "Yeah, he's a different guy than the president-elect," said Hensarling. "But it's very complementary, and they make an excellent partnership."

Pence retweets Trump, using language more typical of a politician. Screen shot hide caption

As Hensarling sees it, Pence has credibility with Trump, and the decision to put Pence in charge of the transition process is one sign of that. Hensarling says Pence also has credibility with Republicans in Congress because of his many years carving a conservative course in the House.

"President-elect Trump has the vision," he said. "And what Mike Pence brings to the table as vice president-elect is someone who knows Capitol Hill. So he can take Donald Trump's vision, help translate into actual policy, legislative language, bill text work it through the process so that it ends up back on Donald Trump's desk so that he can sign it into law."

Pence plans to serve as the lead emissary between the White House and Congress. But how well that works may depend on the strength and durability of Pence's bond with Trump, according to vice president-watcher and St. Louis University School of Law professor Joel Goldstein.

"A vice president's usefulness to members of the House and the Senate depends on his or her access to the president," he said. "If the vice president's not getting much face time with the president, or is out of favor with the president, then what's the point of talking to the vice president?"

When asked in a recent interview which vice president he is looking to as a model, Pence said he saw parallels to George H.W. Bush, who served under President Ronald Reagan another larger-than-life personality who came from outside of Washington promising to shake things up.

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Donald Trump And Mike Pence, The Odd Couple In The White House - NPR

Wall Street Journal

Donald Trump's Presidency: A Look at His Proposed Policy Shifts Wall Street Journal Donald Trump 's presidency is likely to bring big policy shifts across several key aspects of American life. Here is a detailed look at Mr. Trump's agenda broken into three main areas: domestic affairs (health care, immigration, the Supreme Court ... and more »

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Donald Trump's Presidency: A Look at His Proposed Policy Shifts - Wall Street Journal

During Donald Trumps campaign for president, the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, asked him to stop using the phrase America First to describe his foreign policy views.As the ADL explained, the slogan was used by people who warned, ahead of World War II, that Jewish Americans were pushing the U.S.to enter the war because they put their own interests ahead of the countrys.

But Trump never stopped using the slogan. And on Friday, he made it a key part of his inaugural address. From this day forward, he proclaimed, A new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, its going to be America First.

People who arent Jewish or familiar with the history may not realize this, but America First makes many people deeply uncomfortable. In 1941, as members of the America First movement campaigned against U.S. involvement in World War II and expressed sympathy for the Nazis, plenty of people already knew that Jews were being persecuted in Hitlers Germany. Even Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator who led the America First movement, knew it.

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany, Lindbergh said in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

But Lindbergh blamed Jewish Americans for pushing the country towards war, and warned that tolerance of Jews in America could not survive war with Germany. The greatest danger to the U.S., he argued, came not from the Axis powers but in what he saw as Jewishownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

This is dark stuff so dark its even inspired literature. Philip Roth, perhaps the most famous Jewish American writer, published The Plot Against America in 2004. The novel imagines an alternate U.S. history in which America Firsts Lindbergh won the presidential election in 1940, defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Things dont go too well for the Jews after that.

How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didnt see it with my own eyes, Id think I was having a hallucination, Roths father says in the book.

In real life, Lindbergh a celebrity who was at least as famous as Trump at a time when public anti-Semitism was far more acceptable than it is today actually faced some backlash for his speech, as The New Yorkers Louisa Thomas noted in July:

Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Lindbergs time; his attitudes were not fringe. He had not made a secret of his interest in eugenics, nor his racial attitudes, which today seem reprehensible. But with that 1941 speech he seemed to cross a line. He was strongly and swiftly condemned for his anti-Semitic and divisive wordsnot only by interventionists who were opposed to America First but by those who had lionized him. The Des Moines Register called his speech so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country. The Hearst papers, which were generally sympathetic to the non-interventionistsand open about their hatred of Franklin Rooseveltcondemned Lindbergh, calling his speech un-American. His home town took his name off its water tower.

Trump has received some similar criticism: For many Americans, the term America First will always be associated with and tainted by this history, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned last April. In a political season that already has prompted a national conversation about civility and tolerance, choosing a call to action historically associated with incivility and intolerance seems ill-advised.

The new president doesnt seem chastened.

To me, America First is a brand-new modern term, he told The New York Times David Sanger in July. I never related it to the past.

But the past has a way of catching up to you. David Duke, the Holocaust denier and former KKK leader who endorsed Trump and celebrated his ascension to power,has long been happy with the slogan (he used it in his campaign for U.S. Senate), and can hear the dog whistle loud and clear:

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In His Inaugural Address, Donald Trump Embraced Anti-Semites' Slogan - Huffington Post

The 45th President signed a bill passed by Congress earlier this month that would allow retired Gen. James Mattis to serve as defense secretary by waiving the legal requirement that he be out of the military for seven years before doing so, according to White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

Mattis will still need to be confirmed by the Senate, which is expected Friday afternoon.

Cameras rolled as Trump signed his first orders as President in the Capitol, surrounded by congressional leaders.

According to Spicer, the other papers Trump was signing included formal nominations for his Cabinet and a proclamation for a national day of patriotism.

The ceremony took place moments after Trump left the podium outside the Capitol building where he was sworn in and delivered his inaugural address.

As is customary, Trump used a series of pens to sign the measures, then distributed the pens among the people gathered. Presidential signing pens are regularly given out as commemorative gifts to politicians or individuals touched by the action.

The moment played out on live television as Trump offered his first pen to the Democrats around him, first House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who hails from New York and has long known Trump.

The mood was jovial, as Trump, surrounded by family, joked with congressional leaders. He, Pelosi and Schumer talked about trading pens as Pelosi remarked that hers came from the nominating papers of Georgia Rep. Tom Price.

Price, up for Health and Human Services, is being strongly opposed by Democrats, who have attacked him on policy and called for an investigation into some of his stock trades, which Price defended before the Senate committee holding his confirmation hearing this week.

Trump offered Pelosi the pen from the paper he was signing instead, that of transportation secretary nominee Elaine Chao.

Pelosi demurred, with Trump giving the pen to Chao's husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Senate will begin voting on Trump's Cabinet on Friday afternoon, but is only expected to confirm two nominees that day -- Mattis and retired Gen. John Kelly, up for Homeland Security.

The remaining nominees are expected to receive debate, hearings and votes in coming days.

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President Donald Trump signs first bill into law - CNN International