President Trump

Donald Trump’s second inaugural address got a little repetitive in parts.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” he began. “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” Indeed, “our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free,” and a “thrilling new era of national success” is upon us. Trump will work with “purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, and safety,” and he’s already producing results. “National unity is now returning to America, and confidence is soaring like never before,” he said. “A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before,” he added. And although we “must be honest about the challenges we face,” they are surmountable. “From this moment on,” Trump declared, “America’s decline is over.”

As President Donald J. Trump takes office as the 47th president, he declares, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

The irony of Donald Trump taking his presidential oath of office in the same rotunda where QAnon Shaman wandered unmolested four years and 14 days ago seemed lost on nobody.

Certainly not on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who walked side by side into the inauguration as though pallbearers at their own funeral. If only they could have broken their hips in Luxembourg, then they might have avoided the excruciating pain of Monday, too.

Can he keep his coalition together?

The Donald Trump who will begin his second term today is a bigger political bruiser than the neophyte who arrived in Washington after his shocking 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton. The White House he has assembled is a more formidable political machine than the one that was so easily checkmated by clever Democrats last time around. But this extraordinary reinvigoration is less a sign that Trump has grown more professional than that the country has grown more Trumpian.

Trump has never been known for learning on the job. That’s actually what people like about him. Learning on the job suggests adaptability, a character flaw for a public that believes Washington corrupts politicians. His gifts and drawbacks are those he had in 2016 and in 1983. His attorney-general nomination of Matt Gaetz, a man who would never have been confirmed by the Senate, was a classic Trump move. It was reminiscent of eight years ago.

The cultural elites got a free ride under Biden. That ends now.

The tragedy of Joe Biden is not only his cognitive decline. It is not only his very public demise, his transformation from an upright man who spoke in a Pennsylvania boom to a shuffling old fella whispering inanities to the world. It is not only that he ascended to power posing as the defender of the republic and three years later was yakking incoherently in a CNN clash with Donald Trump. ‘Democracy has prevailed’, he told the audience at his inauguration on 20 January 2021, two weeks after a Trumpist mob had sacked the Capitol in a fit of undemocratic pique. ‘We finally beat Medicare’, he mumbled surreally in that CNN debate. From the republic’s protector to its most memed jester – it was a fall of King Lear proportions.

Below is President Trump’s swearing in ceremony followed by his speech for the ages.

“Believe what they do, not what they say”: this is the advice given by sages everywhere. Still, we should listen to what, over the past 100 days, President-elect Donald Trump has said he will do in the next 100. For although he is a liar, his lies are so wholly comprehensive — so totalizing — that it seems as if reality, to him, comprises only what he says is real. In this way, Trump always means what he says.

The Star is afraid.

As he assumed the presidency again, Donald Trump proclaimed a “revolution of common sense” in his second Inaugural Address at the U.S. Capitol. Surrounded by the political elite and the captains of Silicon Valley, the new president pledged to restore faith in American institutions and championed a “manifest destiny into the stars,” with the United States expanding its territory and even planting a flag on Mars. The speech highlighted Trump’s many contrasts with his predecessors, even as it revealed how his political model has evolved.

Former opponents of Trump are said to be begging to be part of his Make America Great Again crusade. It’s a turnaround from the chaos of 2016

The clock had just struck midnight at the pre-inauguration Crypto Ball in Washington DC, and recent converts to Trump’s new America — from California tech millionaires to influencers with glassy smiles and Barbie doll hair — were knocking back mezcal and dancing to 1990s rap. Snoop Dogg was on the decks.

In the lobby, Caroline Wren, a former Trump adviser, rolled her eyes at the latecomers to the Make America Great Again cause. Just a year ago, she said, most of the people here would never have supported the president-elect.

“Now they’re like begging. It’s like The Hunger Games to get in front of Donald Trump,” she said. “It’s hilarious.”

Voters have given Trump and his allies an opportunity to disrupt Washington’s status quo. For their sake, they better not blow it.

When Donald Trump swears at his second inauguration tomorrow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” it will be more than a return to the presidency for a man who left office four years ago. It will also be a rebuke to his skeptics. Consider one such skeptic, who early in 2023 called Trump “an obstacle to the achievement” of progress on “the important issues he brought to or revived in the conservative mainstream,” and declared that “the future of conservatism — even (especially) a conservatism influenced by Trump’s presidency — now depends on rejecting Trump.”