“Every four years we gather on these steps,” Donald Trump told the US on the sombre January day eight years ago when, minutes after being sworn in as the 45th president, he gave his “American carnage” address.
The peculiar thing about watching that infamous address now is that the language and formality seem almost quaint compared with the unhinged verbal mudslinging that defined the 2024 election. Trump, in welcoming the former presidents, thanked the Obamas for their courtesy and help in facilitating the transition. “They have been magnificent,” he said. A grim-faced Obama nodded in acknowledgment and then listened with the other ex-presidents – a wincing Dubya; a shattered Bill Clinton, who sat beside his wife and the defeated Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton – as Trump delivered what sounded like a rebuke not just of those in attendance, but of all the dead presidents as well.
“For too long a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed ... While they celebrated in their nation’s capital there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes. Starting right here and right now!
“Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighbourhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves,” he added. “But for too many of our citizens a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and have robbed our country of so much unrealised potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
A dispirited rain fell over the National Mall that morning. Trump’s face, as he spoke, was grave, even thunderous. It was, commentators across the globe agreed, a dark vision of America. But it was not entirely inaccurate, and he promised to reverse it.
On Monday morning, America will gather again close to those same steps: a dramatic decision was taken, on Friday afternoon, to move the inauguration indoors, to the Rotunda, because of the forecast of extreme cold. The day will represent full circle in a political decade for which American Carnage is an apt title. Trump, irrespective of one’s views, has completed one of the most astonishing reinventions in American political history.
He departed the White House shrouded in infamy, only to somehow return to power by swatting away myriad legal problems, narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that occurred live on television, completely reorienting the Republican Party and all but obliterating long-held certainties of the Democratic Party.
His November election win gives Republicans control of the House and the Senate as well as a return to the White House. He won the popular vote and has repeatedly referred to the win as historic: a landslide.
As with so many things do to with Trump, that depends on your perspective. The 2024 election was without question a crushing repudiation of the Democratic message – whatever that was. It is easy to forget that at the start of last year, Trump was hand in hand with Joe Biden in national unpopularity: this was a contest nobody wanted. But the Democrats suffered a rejection of the foolish insistence that Biden was the best candidate for office even though the man was clearly struggling to communicate in live, unscripted public arenas.
The 11th-hour switch to Kamala Harris temporarily flummoxed Trump’s summer tour. But after a humiliating hour in the second presidential debate – the high point of the Democratic year – he regrouped and delivered a message that went to the heart of darkness. Put me back in or else! Enough listened. The fabled Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin duly crumbled and voted Republican.
However, a tiny shift in votes – as low as 130,000 over those three states – would have tilted the balance in Harris’s favour. Richard Nixon’s 1972 win over George McGovern is a more accurate representation of a landslide: 520 electoral college votes to 17 and every state on the map red apart from Maine. But that didn’t exactly save Nixon.
Trump’s second administration has a five-seat majority in Senate and House, requiring constant fealty and obedience from the Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill. But in emulating the rare feat of Grover Cleveland in winning, losing and then winning the presidency over three consecutive elections, Trump has managed to present himself as something other than a politician. His magic trick has been to convince the disenfranchised and struggling heartland that he, and not the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is the answer to their problems.
To the frustration of the Democrats, Trump, the billionaire businessman, has managed to connect with millions of ordinary Americans in a way the Democrats have found they no longer can.
After the election, Democrats watched on in alarm as Elon Musk, a self-appointed “Dark Maga” rally jester during the autumn of the election campaign, was appointed to a vague, non-official department of government efficiency role.
Musk became a permanent feature around Mar-a-Lago and he will take pride of place at Monday’s inauguration ceremonies and the various evening balls around Washington DC. Also paying homage will be the world’s other leading tech billionaires: Sam Altman (Open AI), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Shou Zi Chew (TikTok), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta). His cabinet is also set to be the wealthiest in history, with Howard Lutnick nominated as commerce secretary, Linda McMahon for education and Scott Bessent, the nominated treasury secretary, all reported to be billionaires.
The unease this cabinet of the uber-privileged has caused was neatly channelled in Biden’s arresting warning, in his elegiac Wednesday night farewell address, that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America”. Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” reportedly spiked in the hours after the address.
Trump’s faith in captains of finance and tech is an extension of his disdain for careerist politicians and what he perceives to be the cosy rug-and-mahogany decorum of the Hill. But where, sceptics wonder, on the track records of the billionaire appointees, lies any evidence of past interest for the subjects of Trump’s first inauguration speech – those inner-city mothers, those wasteland basketball towns of the Rust Belt?
The anxiety sounded through the persistent line of questioning all week from the Democratic senators of the various committees tasked with drilling the cabinet appointees for weaknesses of experience and character. The well-coached and at times evasive responses did little to ease their disquiet.
Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi felt unable to state that Trump had lost the 2020 election. Pete Hegseth, the controversial choice for defence secretary, was unable to answer senator Tammy Duckworth when she asked him how many nations are in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and to name at least one. He didn’t know the figure and then named three countries.
“Mr Hegseth, none of those countries that you mention are in Asean.”
But it didn’t matter. Hegseth got a standing ovation from a room full of supporters. The Republican senators will fall in line in the voting confirmation. It was a week when the Democratic lawmakers got their first taste of what it will be like to live in this world of Trump Republicanism Mk II.
One of the Republican rationales, during the darker extremes of Trump’s election rhetoric, was that it was just that: talk. And that, anyway, he had already spent four years in office and the sky had not fallen in.
Clearly, the events of January 6th, 2021, did not register deeply among enough Americans to decide the election. And like all presidents, Trump found those four years pass at the speed of light even as the tricky business of getting things done can move at glacial pace. It was true the cost of living was favourable during his term in office. And if it was also true that if he added $8.4 trillion to the national debt, it wasn’t just on tax cuts: $3.6 trillion is accounted through Covid relief laws and $2.3 trillion in spending increases.
While Trump likes to claim he built 500 miles of the wall along the southern border, Customs and Border Protection reports estimate that 52 miles consisted of new primary wall systems, 33 miles of secondary wall systems and the rest was repairs and upgrades. And his most famous promise to “drain the swamp” never happened. Otherwise, as he sometimes wistfully told his crowds this year, he wouldn’t be doing this.
But he is doing this. Washington is quiet and cold this weekend. In Los Angeles, the wildfires burn. And a flame of strange, beautiful and singularly American artistic vision was extinguished with the death of David Lynch. It feels as if the United States of America is moving into a different era.
At 78, president Donald Trump is like the boy who got everything he ever wished for. On Monday, under the watchful gaze of Washington, of Reagan, of Eisenhower, he will tell the American people what he plans to do with it.
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