Washington: Donald Trump sat at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders for the cameras and taking questions from a small pool of journalists clumped in the Oval Office. The orders traversed his pardons for the January 6 rioters, the ceasefire in the Middle East, immigration, tariffs, energy, Greenland – you name it.
“Does Biden ever do news conferences like this?” Trump asked the reporters midway through his musings about TikTok. “How many news conferences, Peter, has he done like this?”
Peter Doocy from Fox News duly replied: “Like this? Zero.”
The four Donalds: Trump takes the oath at the US Capitol, speaks off the cuff outside the ceremony, takes the stage at the Capitol One Arena and returns to the Oval Office.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
They might be right about that. It’s difficult to picture Biden – certainly lately – casually freewheeling his thoughts about Gaza (“a phenomenal location”), whether he might send US special forces into Mexico to hunt down cartels (“stranger things have happened”) and the pledge to end the Ukraine war on the first day in office (“this is only half a day, I have another half a day left”).
The calm, chatty, discursive and above all confident Trump we witnessed in the Oval Office after a day of ceremonies and speeches was different to the Trumps we saw earlier. And though they all share the same fixations and grievances, each Trump we encountered showed us another iteration of the 47th president.
In the Capitol Rotunda we had Trump’s best approximation of a statesman: still vindictive and aggrieved, but controlled, on message and maybe even a little humbled by the occasion. Later, he explained that Vice President J.D. Vance had counselled him to take out of the speech “some really rough stuff” – rants about the January 6 insurrectionists (Trump calls them “hostages”) and Biden’s decision to pardon his family before leaving office, among others.
No matter; the second Trump would take care of that. Downstairs at the Emancipation Hall, which housed an overflow of guests who couldn’t fit in the Rotunda, Trump transformed into his stand-up comedian alter ego. Would it be wrong to say the president missed his true calling? You can see how much it pleases him when a line lands and he has the (admittedly sympathetic) audience eating out of his hand. Just in case it wasn’t clear, he told us: he thought the second was a much better speech than his actual inaugural address.
Next, he headed back to Capital One Arena, where he’d rallied the faithful only a day before. This was soapbox Trump: boisterous, cruel, sometimes randomly loud and always performative. This time, he came with props: a bunch of executive orders the newly minted president signed with thick black Sharpies which he then tossed into the crowd. “Could you imagine Biden doing this?” he asked at one point. (With every type of Trump, one constant is the need to mock his rivals.)
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