For Americans of all political persuasion, the familiar sight of Donald Trump in leisure wear and thwacking a golf ball up the fairway might have been a comfort this week. For Republicans, it represented further evidence of a dynamic, active president at play.
Democrats could take consolation from the thought that if he was on the golf course, then at least he couldn’t be signing executive orders. But then, who would have been truly surprised to find some semblance of the Resolute Desk sitting on the 18th green, a stack of black-booked orders waiting for the presidential signature and trademark flourish?
On Air Force One on Wednesday, the president stood in the door way to conduct a chat with the travelling White House press corps. He seemed in agreeable mood. “We’re gonna go into Fort Knox, did you know that?” he told them. In reply, he was asked if there was a plan to eliminate further national security positions. “We’ll see what happens,” he said before reverting to his preferred theme. “We’re gonna go to Fort Knox - the fabled Fort Knox - and make sure the gold is there.”
Then came a question, from an unseen reporter, that hauntingly caught the mood of the opening month of the 47th administration: utter mystification and bafflement.
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“Where would the gold have gone?”
“If the gold isn’t there, we’re gonna be very upset,” Trump said and let that hang, at 30,000ft, for the code-crackers to decipher.
The exchange felt like a perfect example of the sense of uncertainty as to where the United States is headed. Through its alarm, the commentariat must couch its warnings in ifs and buts. The first month has been such a firestorm of activity and change and increasingly alarmed global headlines - the most recent caused by the president’s public dressing-down of Volodymyr Zelenskiy - that there has scarcely been any time for considered response.
For many among the slender majority of US voters who voted for Trump, the spectacular and expertly choreographed programme of sweeping, provocative change – the bureaucracy ransacked; the DEI culture obliterated; the mass lay-offs of federal workers; the threatened acquisition of Greenland and the casual insults and tariff threats towards Canada - are signs that the new golden age of American prosperity and strength is upon them.
But for the 49 per cent who believe Trump to be a ruinous chapter in the grand history of the White House, the abiding feelings range from disbelief to fear to resignation to a worry that American democracy is reaching an end point.
What both sides share is a lack of certainty as to where all of this is going to leave the US. An odd moment happened during the Air Force One exchange. The big jet went through a spot of turbulence. The president grimaced and grabbed hold of the doorway. “That was a nasty bump,” he said, ever alert to his image in front of the camera. But it was a glimpse of ordinary human vulnerability; a flicker of a reminder Trump will turn 79 this summer.
He has never been more powerful. But his time is finite.
Even those Democrats who made peace with November’s result and decided to lean into the potential for positive change brought about by the abrasive New Yorker could not reconcile their stance with the facts of the first month, from Elon Musk’s unlimited access to the federal houses to the unprovoked threats and verbal assaults on Greenland, on Canada and most recently on the people of Ukraine, to the teasing declaration − in one of Trump’s social media posts − of “LONG LIVE THE KING!”.
But the party lacks a leading voice and its followers are entitled to ask where are all the famous faces and names - Kamala Harris and Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey - who delivered that short-lived moment of “joy” to the Democrats in Chicago last August? Where are they now in the party’s hour of need?
And the engines of the Trump administration are only beginning to rev up. RFK jnr is just starting to announce his plans to overhaul the department of health. On Thursday, Kash Patel was confirmed as head of the FBI. He has already vowed to scatter its operations across the country, closing J Edgar Hoover building so it can be reopened as “a museum of the deep state”.
“What’s the mood like?” people ask. In many ways, the same as ever. Life goes on. The talkshows, the ball games, work, family, laughter ... the American public has to get on with the day-to-day business of living. Europe’s cold reckoning does not register as strongly here. Chamberlain’s old refrain - “a quarrel in a faraway country” – still holds true for many. It’s early days but there is just a low-fi sense that the US is about to enter a new, entirely unfamiliar chapter.
March 4th is slated as the date for Trump’s state of the union address. The invitation was extended on January 31st by the House of Representatives speaker, Mike Johnson.
The weight of the union might be a more apt title.
