His second inaugural address was fractionally less dark than his first, when he painted a graffiti-strewn picture of “American carnage”. Our ears have become more attuned to his bombast. But it still had echoes of the Book of Revelation. For Trump, the hellfires that ravaged the City of Angels illustrated the decrepitude of the US government rather than the ravages of global warming. From the presidential podium, he proclaimed “drill baby drill”, which in a world marking a decade of the warmest years on record was tantamount to shouting “burn baby burn”.
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“National unity is returning to America,” he claimed, while simultaneously assailing transgender compatriots by stating the US government would recognise just two genders, men and women. On the day the country also marked the Martin Luther King national holiday, he spoke of ending “the government policy trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”; an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion. The claustrophobic setting for the inauguration may have brought those who attended closer, but not the content of the speech. Even as he portrayed himself as a “unifier”, he demonstrated his populist mastery at exploiting America’s divisions. And let’s not be naive, Trump is presently winning the culture wars, and he is framing fights over race, gender and immigration way beyond America’s shores.
The 11th hour switch of venue meant the choreography was not as slick as normal. As a military choir marched into the Rotunda belting out, yes, “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord”, singers had to shoulder-barge their way down the aisles. The seating plan, however, was a thing of careful design. Tech giants who control so much of the world’s information flow – Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and, inexorably, Elon Musk – were given better seats than senior figures in Trump’s incoming cabinet. In his farewell address, Joe Biden warned “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence”. Here, it seemed, was proof not just of the departing president’s ultra-wealthy “tech-industrial complex”, but also of the foundation of a Trump-Tech nexus. Presidential inaugurals, after all, are as much about power watching as people watching.
It is precisely the fusion of Trump’s disruptive politics and the tech bros’ disruptive algorithms that make this moment feel so unsettling and epoch-making. At a Trump rally held after the inauguration, Musk jumped around the stage as if attending his own Silicon Valley product launch, and ominously made what some thought looked like fascist-style salutes. With Musk earmarked for West Wing office space, Trump might well end up being a moderating influence within his own administration, a startling prospect. Given Musk’s omnipresence on his social media platform X and his gravitational pull over the media, it is hard sometimes to decipher who in the MAGA firmament is the sun and who is the moon.
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For centre-left international leaders, such as Anthony Albanese, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the prospect of contending with the world’s most powerful man is daunting enough. Now comes the double challenge of dealing with the world’s richest man, who has no qualms about intervening in the domestic politics of allies to bolster right-wing – and in Germany, the far right AfD – populist fellow travellers.
Over the next four years, it would be an act of analytical folly to reflexively label all of Trump’s actions as wrong-headed, dangerous or an affront to democracy. There would not have been a ceasefire in the Middle East had Trump not strong-armed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A lesson from his first administration, moreover, is that Trump’s bark is often worse than his bite and that some of his most outlandish statements are designed to accrue bargaining leverage. Yet already we have seen, in his desire to purchase Greenland, his threat to take back control of the Panama Canal and his unilateral decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, ample evidence of his heightened indifference to world opinion and international norms.
Many will reject the notion that America has entered “a golden age”, although a billionaire-friendly redux of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century is a real possibility. But that ride down the golden escalator in 2015 signalled the start of the age of Trump. For almost a decade, we have felt its upending effects.
The US Constitution offers safeguards. A judge has already temporarily blocked Trump’s new executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”, which it so obviously is. But Trump, who is as much a demolitionist as he is a builder, will try to further bulldoze longstanding US and global rules and norms.
The fashion is to label his new administration “Trump 2.0”. But given how few political constraints inhibit him, perhaps we should think of it more as “Trump squared” or even “Trump to the power of 10”. God, “the Donald” and pliant princes from Silicon Valley. In his mind, it must be quite the Trumpian trinity. From the inaugural platform, the American vista will look radically different in four years’ time.
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
