Trump's golden age of chaos has begun

It was a day to chill the blood. Donald Trump’s second inauguration dawned bright but deathly cold in Washington DC. Flags at the Capitol flew at half-staff, their ropes frozen to the poles.

Behind the Trumps at a church service before the inauguration ceremony began, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sat, alongside Joe Rogan, as the faces of America’s now-ruling billionaire oligopoly – later joined by Elon Musk at the ceremony. En route to the Capitol, manosphere influencers Jake and Logan Paul shared a motorcade car with boxer and court-adjudicated rapist Conor McGregor, who the previous night took a selfie with Nigel Farage.

The frigid temperatures pushed the ceremony inside the rotunda instead of the traditional location outside on the steps. It was broadcast instead to a crowd inside a sports arena – avoiding another round of 2017’s crowd size discourse, if nothing else. Neither supporters, nor any major protests crowded the eerily empty Mall. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos sat in the front row, in front even of Trump’s cabinet picks.

The invocation was given by right wing-adored evangelical revivalist scion Franklin Graham, before Brett Kavanaugh administered the vice-presidential oath to Vance. Then, at 12:01pm US time, Trump was once again the president of the United States.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” was how he restored president started his speech. He said that “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.”

Biden, rictus grin on his face, looked on as Trump painted a picture of a country in “decline.” He said: “We now have a government that cannot manage a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumble into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad.”

He twisted the knife: “We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people.”

It wasn’t actually a particularly vintage Trump performance. He is at his best when he has a crowd to riff off – indoors, in front of a teleprompter, the speech was lower-energy. Certainly, compared to 2017’s fire and brimstone American Carnage address, almost muted at times in tone if not in its actual content.

In one peculiar moment, talking about the Los Angeles wildfires, Trump said “they’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer.” Then he paused. “That’s interesting,” he added. “But we can’t let this happen.”

But largely, Trump stuck to the script. “All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly,” he said. “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. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

That’s not to say any of this was remotely close to normal. “After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” Trump said, bafflingly – there is no clarity at all on what he means by this; it might conceivably have been a TikTok reference.

“Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponised to persecute political opponents… something I know something about,” he added, having spent the entire campaign promising to prosecute his political opponents.

In fact, in its closing actions, the Biden administration issued preemptive pardons for several people Trump has threatened to pursue and prosecute, including Dr Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, and the witnesses and members of the January 6 investigative committee, as well as members of his family and, in one bright spot for the day, Native American activist Leonard Peltier. These pardons were not an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, the administration said, but it still hands Trump an early political win.

The two presidents, with a combined age of 160, stood awkwardly side by side outside the White House for photographs before going inside for the ceremony. “Welcome home,” Biden said to Trump when he arrived.

Trump’s first actions as president willl come almost immediately, as he promised a wild flurry of more than 100 executive orders, announced the weekend before he took the oath of office. The declaration of a state of emergency at the southern border. Another emergency declaration over energy, allowing the US to withdraw from the Paris climate change accords.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement are set to start a series of raids as soon as Tuesday. Drug cartels will be designated as “terrorist” organisations, opening the door for military action on Mexican soil.

All federal government diversity hiring initiatives will be ended. Birthright citizenship – the long-standing constitutional right, under the 14th Amendment, of anyone born in the US to be American – is to be shut off by a re-interpretation of the law (though it seems unlikely this would hold up in court).

The federal government will be instructed, too, to count only male and female gender and only by that assigned at birth, and bar federal funding for programs “that acknowledge people who identify as transgender.” Plainly put, that means the US government will formally deny the existence of trans people.

And then Trump’s speech reached the foreign policy section. “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world,” he said. “A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.” This was followed by a peculiar rant about President McKinley, whose name Trump promised to restore to Mount McKinley.

Renaming things is fine. It’s was the next section, though, that offered cause for alarm. “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable,” Trump said. “We will not be intimidated. We will not be broken and we will not fail. From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign and independent nation.”

Specifically, Trump claimed Panama had violated its treaty obligations in the Panama Canal. “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form, and that includes the United States Navy,” he claimed.

“And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama. And we’re taking it back,” he promised.

Trump has floated this kind of thing before, during the campaign – but in some lights, in the context of an inaugural address, this could be seen as a threat, if not outright declaration, of war. He once again promised tariffs, though stopped short of announcing them immediately – and made clear by hinting at creating an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs from other countries that he doesn’t actually know what tariffs are.

That doesn’t matter, though. The strategy, now more than ever, is to flood the zone. To “own the libs,” amplified to governmental scale. To overwhelm with impotent outrage so that nothing can be fully covered, or understood, let alone opposed.

The Republicans win when the Democrats talk about norms, clinging on to an age of politics when people stuck, to a certain extent, to a certain set of rules. There are no norms now. There is only chaos.

Trump didn’t end with his usual refrain of “we’re going to make America great again.” He returned, instead, to the opening line of the speech. “Our golden age,” he said, “has just begun.”