When Donald Trump was sworn in for his first term eight years ago, he offered a famously pessimistic characterization of the country. He painted a picture of “American carnage”: a crime- and poverty-plagued, post-industrial wasteland that is home to “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” Former President George W. Bush reportedly reacted by saying to Hillary Clinton, “That was some weird shit.”
Ahead of his inauguration this time, Trump promised he would focus on “bringing our country together.”
But Trump’s remarks in his official inauguration speech ended up being dour, divisive and self-aggrandizing.
“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place, and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed, their freedom,” he declared. “From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
Trump again suggested that the two assassination attempts against him by lone wolves with unknown or incoherent ideologies were part of a broader conspiracy to thwart his political career. His survival of the nearly deadly assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July was a sign from God, he argued.
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said.
What’s more, rather than promise to be a president for all Americans, including those who voted against him and are deeply anxious about his presidency, Trump’s vision of “unity” seems to presume that the whole country has gotten behind his agenda. While Trump’s Electoral College win came down to just a few points in the seven battleground states, he made sure to tout his victories, including the popular vote win that he did not manage during his first run,
“As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda, with dramatic increases in support for virtually every element of our society, young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban, suburban, rural,” Trump said. “And very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states and the popular vote, we won by millions of people.”
A subsequent speech to supporters in the basement of the U.S. Capitol was even more negative and self-aggrandizing, as Trump lit into political enemies like former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.). “Why are we helping Liz Cheney? She’s a crying lunatic,” he said of former President Joe Biden’s decision to preemptively pardon Cheney on his way out.
Here are five more takeaways:
An Abundance Of Billionaires Among The Self-Styled Working-Class Party
It’s hard to miss the symbolism on display at Trump’s second inaugural. The best seats in the house went to the richest men in the world while the president’s supporters were left out in the (literal) cold with either no view or forced to watch on screens from the Capital One Arena, which only seats 20,000, after spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to actually witness the inauguration.
The front-row seats went to Tesla, SpaceX and X owner Elon Musk, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, Alphabet (Google) head Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Trump’s Cabinet, who will (supposedly) govern, sat behind them. Also in attendance, billionaire donor Miriam Adelson, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. The room easily cleared $1 trillion in net worth.
It wasn’t long ago that these tech titans shied away from Trump. During his first term, they kept their distance while still seeking protection from his regulatory wrath. Bezos gave his Washington Post the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Zuckerberg funded a pro-immigration nonprofit and helped local election offices with donations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brin even attended protests against Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017. Now, they’re all in the front row, beaming.
Trump has always been drawn to wealth and status. His career from Queens to Manhattan to D.C. can largely be seen as a long effort to gain the respect of these very elites — even if he had to dominate them to gain it. He has it now. But the tech billionaires have their own interests that are almost certain to collide with those of Trump’s supporters who were left in the cold on Monday. Have they merely bought protection by bending the knee or will their money rule?
In Trump’s Mind, It’s America vs. The World
Claiming that he’s always wanted his legacy to be that of a “peacemaker,” Trump said in his official inauguration speech that the U.S. will “measure our success, not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Moments later, he stated that he planned to “take back” the Panama Canal.
Instead of George W. Bush’s infamous Manichean “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” Trump’s foreign policy vision does not include an option for allies to be “with us.” Since winning election, he has directly clashed with close allies by calling for seizing the Panama Canal, buying Greenland from Denmark, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and conquering Canada to make it the 51st state.
This foreign policy vision sees all interactions between states as zero sum. There are no win-win situations in diplomacy, there is always a loser. And, in Trump’s mind, it’d better not be him.
Trump’s stated trade policy is an obvious example of this line of thinking. If one country sells more products into the U.S. than the U.S. exports to them, it is a loss and the importer must be punished. Thus, we get the “External Revenue Service,” to impose tariffs (which are ultimately paid by Americans, not foreign countries).
Zero-sum thinking threatens to escalate conflict, even if Trump claims to want to be a “peacemaker.” This has been true in past presidential administrations, none of which have been immune to this kind of thinking. What separates Trump from the past is that he sees all relationships, with allies as well as adversaries, as zero sum. Whatever one thinks of this strategic mindset, it isn’t one of someone who wants to be a peacemaker.
Trump Is Already Prioritizing Petty Cultural Grievances
When pollsters survey the issues that propelled Trump to a second term in the White House, the same few topics tend to come up: inflation and the economy; immigration and the border; an overall desire for change; and foreign affairs. Pitching himself as a change agent, Trump was able to convince enough voters he would lower costs while growing the economy, crack down on unlawful border crossings and restore order to a chaotic and war-torn world through a projection of American strength.
In Trump’s remarks on Monday, he spent a lot of time discussing how he would tighten border security and begin deporting undocumented immigrants, but spoke far less about how he plans to lower the price of groceries.
At the same time, Trump made sure to promise action on cosmetic culture war battles that please his right-wing base, while doing little to improve Americans’ lives or effect his stated policy goals.
Trump reiterated his promise to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the “Gulf of America” — a naming decision that does not guarantee adoption by Mexico or other foreign countries.
He also repeated his plans to revert to calling Alaska’s Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, Mount McKinley. The Obama administration officially dubbed the mountain Denali in 2015 out of deference to the snowy peak’s original Alaska Native name. The state’s two Republican senators have said they like the current name.
But in keeping with his enthusiasm for late 19th and early 20th century American tariffs and imperialism, Trump considers restoring the reputation of former President William McKinley, the mountain’s namesake from 1917 to 2015, a top priority.
“President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” Trump said. “He was a natural businessman, and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama.”
In still another sign that Trump’s second term will be defined by relatively insubstantial culture war salvos, he touted his planned first-day executive order ensuring the federal government only recognizes two genders.
“It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.
It is unclear how often, and in what contexts, the federal government had been accommodating nonbinary people’s pronouns or other genderqueer identities. It is clear that it will have no bearing on ordinary Americans’ ability to pay their bills.
Trump Tees Up Immediate Supreme Court Clashes, Constitutional Crisis
Trump ran on ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and on Monday signed an executive order purporting to do just that. In doing so, he is effectively suspending the Constitution: The 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, something the Supreme Court has ruled going back to the late 19th century.
This action will almost certainly be taken to court immediately. And it will wind up before the Supreme Court. Despite the court’s recent Trumpian turn in cases like the grant of presidential immunity in Trump v. U.S., it would be beyond shocking for this court to overturn its 125-year-old interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Another Trump immigration pronouncement is also certain to wind up before the high court. In another order, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to claim that the migration amounts to an invasion of the country. The controversial law allows the president to suspend due process for noncitizens whom the president deems to be loyal to the invading enemy. Courts have repeatedly rejected this argument going back to the 1990s, noting that an invasion must be a military incursion by an invading state and not immigration.
These clashes with the judiciary will be central to Trump’s second term as he seeks to surmount and eradicate longstanding shibboleths of the existing American legal regime.
Trump (Somehow) Claimed The Mantle Of Martin Luther King
Of all of the delusional and arrogant flourishes in Trump’s inaugural address, vowing to realize the vision laid out by Martin Luther King Jr. surely took the cake.
King, whose birthday commemoration coincided with inauguration this year, famously described his “dream” for the United States during the 1963 March on Washington: a country where all people, including historically oppressed Black Americans, would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Trump invoked King shortly after boasting of his strong performance with Black, Latino and Asian American voters — traditionally Democratic groups with whom Trump indeed made historic inroads.
“Today is Martin Luther King Day, and in his honor — this will be a great honor — but in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true,” Trump said.
King’s hopes for the country — and the world — went far beyond ending official, institutionalized racism. He identified as a “democratic socialist,” who wanted the state to play a much larger role in sanding off capitalism’s rough edges, and sought an end to the imperial hubris that had led the United States into foreign conflicts like the Vietnam War.
But even taking King’s dream of ending explicit racism on its own, Trump’s pretensions to achieving that dream, after so many others have failed, are laughable.
Trump began his current turn in the national spotlight in 2011 when he spread the “birther” lie that then-President Barack Obama was born in a foreign country and thus ineligible to be president. The conspiracy-laden campaign to smear Obama was rife with racist innuendo about Obama’s Kenyan heritage.
As a presidential candidate and later, as president, Trump characterized Mexican immigrants as mostly rapists and criminals; cast doubt on a federal judge’s ability to adjudicate a lawsuit against Trump University based on the judge’s Mexican heritage; disparaged Islam as a whole and banned residents of several majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S.; and continued to insist on the guilt of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of rape in 1989 who were later exonerated.
Additionally, Trump announced plans in his inaugural address to do away with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government, promising to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”
King’s position on efforts to deliberately elevate Black job and university applicants to correct for the enduring effects of centuries of subjugation are hotly debated. Conservatives — including prominent Black conservatives — maintain that his “content of their character” framework suggests he supported efforts to equalize opportunity, rather than shape outcomes.
We Won’t Back Down
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But there were signs during King’s life that he would have backed the “affirmative action” programs that mostly took root after his death. He supported a massive, federally-funded jobs program targeted explicitly at Black Americans whom he insisted deserved “compensatory treatment” from the United States government.
“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro,” King said, according to biographer Stephen Oates.