Divided union of the snake

“I saved you, I saved you, I saved you,” cried that woman.

“And you’ve bit me, heavens why?

You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”

The crowds at Trump rallies often join in, shouting along enthusiastically with the final lines: 

“Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin.

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’

Late morning East Coast time on Monday, January 20th, 2025, on the steps of the US Capitol building, the ceremony will begin for Donald Trump’s second inauguration. A New York tenor named Christopher Macchio will sing the national anthem. Country singer Carrie Underwood will perform America the Beautiful. At around noon, Trump and JD Vance will be officially sworn in as president and vice president of the United States.

With his right hand upraised and his left hand on a bible, Trump will promise “that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then – before a parade takes him to the White House to inspect the troops he now, once again, controls – he will address the nation.

The significance of the imagery of the Capitol building as a backdrop for this moment in history will be inescapable. It has only been four years, though it feels so much longer, since January 6, 2021. Since the day a mob of Trump supporters attacked and stormed this building, part of an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the previous year’s election.

Some of the police officers set to line the parade route on Monday will have been colleagues of Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died from a series of strokes after being sprayed with chemical irritant by rioters. Some will be former colleagues of Gunther Hashida, Kyle DeFreytag, Jeffrey Smith, and Howard Liebengood, four officers who defended the Capitol and since took their own lives.

At his 2017 inauguration, I watched Trump ascend to the world’s most powerful job. In freezing drizzle under a grey sky, the new president spoke for just 17 minutes: a short, dark speech, quickly defined by rhetoric about “American carnage.” 

But Trump in 2025 is a remarkably different figure than he was then. Diminished, less coherent, less energetic. But, also, unleashed. 

He started his first term by surrounding himself with more-or-less establishment figures: generals, lobbyists, or Republican political strategists. There are few such figures in his orbit this time around. 

There’s two ways it could go – depending on the comparative favour of two distinct groups emerging as powerbases in Trumpworld. One of these, centred around Elon Musk, are the Silicon Valley acolytes; people like Peter Thiel, whose money and influence over the social media information ecosystem helped power his electoral success. 

It includes Musk’s political allies like Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharma CEO and former presidential candidate who Trump has tipped to co-lead the meme-gimmick “Department of Government Efficiency” alongside Musk.  Other Silicon Valley oligarchs, like Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, are all flying to Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before the incoming president. Microsoft and Google have donated huge sums to his inaugural fund.

The other camp is centred around people like Steve Bannon and far-right activist Laura Loomer, among many others. They represent Trump’s more traditional populist core support. Economic protectionism, and anti-immigration policies, enforced with violence if necessary.

There is already no love lost between the two warring tribes of MAGA and DOGE. Even during the campaign, the ethno-nationalist protectionalists and the ultra-capitalist techno-libertarians made for strange ideological bedfellows. But within days of the election, this fragile coalition started tearing itself apart. 

One early flashpoint was the appointment, on Musk’s recommendation, of Indian-American tech investor Sriram Krishnan. Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist in his first election and term, criticised “big tech oligarchs” for supporting programs like the H1B, a visa program used by Silicon Valley companies to import skilled workers, including programmers, from overseas.

Enter Loomer. An activist and conspiracy theorist, she infamously posted during the campaign that if Harris won “the White House will smell like curry” – drawing condemnation even from far-right Qanon-adjacent congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s worth pausing on that: imagine being so unpleasant you’re being called out by Marjorie Taylor fucking Greene? 

Nonetheless, Loomer became a Trump confidante, a regular guest at events and on his jet. Now, she weighed into the MAGA-DOGE civil war. “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India. It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas.”

Musk’s response was to go immediately into maximum attack mode. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he posted. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” 

It seems wild that it might possibly never have occurred to Musk, even while on the stump with the hardliners, listening to all the rhetoric, that the immigrants whose deportation Trump’s crowd cheered so loudly for would be, well… his sort of immigrants. The ones that make him, and his cronies, rich. Or that the talk of tariffs, which would be disastrous for a lot of their business, might be anything more than just that: talk.

Now they’re starting to discover exactly who it is they’ve thrown their lot in with. “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time [Trump] is inaugurated,” Bannon said flatly in an interview on November 12. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” he continued. “I made it my personal thing to take this guy down.” In a particularly illuminating line, he just said straight out: “before, because [Musk] put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.” 

Musk and Bannon, in some ways, are mirrors of each other. They are both cultural arsonists who believe the world should burn, as long as it is them who get to rebuild it from the ashes. They are both hair-trigger volatile and unpredictable, with vast but fragile egos that render them incapable of de-escalation. Now they are at war with each other. 

Which means the big question in parsing Trump’s inaugural speech on Monday will be: which side will he take? He has so far seemed to side with Musk – but that is by no means guaranteed to continue, especially with Stephen Miller, a hardline Bannon acolyte on immigration issues, as his deputy chief of staff. 

Trump is nothing if not wildly mercurial, and while the election intertwined his fate with Musk’s and the incoming president still seems enamoured by the sheer scale of his preposterous wealth, he also loves his base. He loves his crowds, more than anything else in the world. 

More: it is easy to see how he might quickly start to resent the presence in his government of someone whose viral potential – whose power – might start to rival his own, especially if his crowds start to demand it. Musk may already have flown too close to the sun.

Yet, surely, all these craven Silicon Valley billionaires who backed Trump must have known the ultimately Faustian nature of the pact they were signing with the far right. Did these oligarchs, in their ultimate hubris, really think the MAGA crowd could be bought, or bent to their will, or – possibly most naive of all – safely ignored? Did MAGA, for their part, think the oligarchs would just fall in line with their ideological project, even against their financial interests? Maybe they saw Musk as an ally, in cruelty at least, if not in economics? 

They have deluded themselves into thinking Trump can be steered; that he is anything other than nature’s perfect idiot, a purely reactive creature who can, and will, on a dime, turn on any idea or person almost at random. For fuck’s sake – where does this naivete keep coming from, over and over and over again? 

As Trump’s crowds so often shout, and perhaps will again on Monday, on the steps of the US Capitol itself: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”