Today’s inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States could not be more different from when he was sworn in as the 45th President eight long years ago.
Back then Trump was regarded by the American Establishment as a vulgar intruder, propelled to power with Kremlin connivance (the media was obsessed with ‘Russian collusion’, which somehow it never managed to prove) and the backing, in Hillary Clinton‘s memorable phrase, of a ‘basket of deplorables’, her snobbish (and self-defeating) reference to a white, working-class voter base with unfashionable opinions.
The near-unanimous view among Washington’s power brokers was that the unworthy Trump had no right to be there.
His alien invasion was a fluke, a scam, a nasty aberration. They consoled themselves that it was also likely to be temporary. But, just to make sure, the resistance was fired up from the start.
The day after his 2017 inauguration tens of thousands of women marched through the US capital sporting ‘pussyhats’ (pink hats with cat’s ears), a gesture of feminist outrage at his locker-room description, caught on tape, of how he handled women attracted by his celebrity.
The Left-wing media, which in America means most of the media, was quickly unleashed to disparage and ridicule him at every turn. Congress and the courts were geared up to thwart him, even attempt to impeach him (twice).
Trump’s narrow defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 seemed to vindicate this strategy. He had been dispatched to internal exile in his Mar-a-Lago gilded cage as an army of Democratic lawyers and political opportunists were mobilised to wreak revenge by picking over his carcass in multiple court actions. The ‘nightmare’ was over. The ‘grown-ups’ were back in charge.
But not for long – and their real nightmare is only just beginning.
Today Trump retakes power in a freezing cold Washington (so cold the ceremony has had to be moved inside Capitol Hill), the undisputed victor of the presidential election of 2024 and the head, not of a temporary insurgency, but of a new ruling multi-ethnic Republican coalition – a new establishment, if you will – which controls not just the White House but the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court.
He is the first Republican presidential candidate who was not the incumbent to win the popular vote since Ronald Reagan in 1980. The first President since Grover Cleveland in 1893 to be elected to two non-consecutive terms.
He will take the oath of office today as master of all he surveys, the head of an occupying army that Washington loathes but is powerless to resist. It is the old political establishment, not Trump, that has been displaced – and is now in retreat, perhaps even chaos.
The anti-Trump media is in decline and disarray. The Democrats are still in denial about the scale of their defeat last November. Kamala Harris’s campaign manager recently told a Harvard seminar her campaign had been ‘flawless’.
There will be no ‘pussyhat’ demonstration to follow this inauguration. Resistance will no doubt gather as Trump’s second administration unfolds. But for now it has crumbled.
There is no more telling sign of the new realpolitik in America than the way in which the country’s Big Tech oligarchs have flocked, first to Mar-a-Lago, now to today’s inauguration, to pay obeisance to the once and future Sun King.
Those who only recently regarded Trump as something close to satanic have lined up to kiss his ring. The competition to abase themselves is almost comical.
Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, who once conspired with Democrats to block pro-Trump and anti-Biden stuff on his Facebook platform, spent Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago. He now speaks of the need for more ‘masculine energy’ in American business.
He has abolished fact-checking on Facebook, which Trumpers saw as a front for censoring conservative opinions (sometimes it was) and appointed a close Trump friend (Dana White) to his board. It doesn’t get more grovelling than that.
Unless, of course, you’re Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, another of Trump’s new dining companions. He’s just ponied up $40 million for a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Melania Trump to be aired on his streaming platform, Amazon Prime Video. I wouldn’t hold your breath for much revelation. The First Lady will be the producer as well as the star of the show.
Bezos, of course, stopped the Washington Post (which he owns) from endorsing Biden in November. Now he’s ordered Prime to livestream the inauguration for no good reason (there’s hardly a shortage of platforms on which to watch it), other than further to ingratiate himself. He is a truly worthy winner of the Order of the Brown Nose.
Zuckerberg and Bezos have stumped up $1 million each towards the inauguration festivities, as have Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Along with the original Trump ‘tech bro’, Elon Musk, they will all have a ringside seat at today’s ceremony in the Capitol rotunda.
There are enough tech bros in Washington for them already to have staged their very own pre-inauguration Crypto Ball. In 2017 there weren’t enough to fill a broom cupboard.
It doesn’t stop there. America’s Big Tech companies, only recently the epitome of all that was liberal, progressive and achingly woke in US life, are now in the forefront of dismantling their expensive, pervasive and energy-sapping ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) policies. They know the Trump administration will go to war on DEI so they are pre-empting it.
Zuckerberg has scrapped various DEI programmes, which have attracted an army of opportunists and identity-politics grifters. Tampon machines have been removed from men’s toilets at Meta HQ. The post of chief diversity officer has been abolished.
But this sea-change in corporate attitudes is not confined to Big Tech. Some of the biggest names in America – Motorola, Harley-Davidson, Ford, Molson Coors brewers – are now junking DEI. Retail giant Walmart has stopped funding its Centre for Racial Equity, started in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
A second Trump term will hasten the death knell of DEI, whose legal basis was already weakened when the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional. I suspect the rest of the world will look at this – and follow America’s example.
DEI’s big brother, environmental, social and governance (ESG), is also on the way out. In a frenzy of virtue-signalling, big companies rushed to make ESG considerations as important as making a profit. From Wall Street down, ESG is quietly taking a back seat.
Interestingly, mega asset managers, BlackRock, whose boss, Larry Fink, was once tagged ‘king of the woke industrial complex’ by Trumpers, is leading the way.
BlackRock – along with several other Wall Street giants – has also pulled out of a net-zero group run by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, once mayor of New York, and Mark Carney, once governor of the Bank of England and would-be next prime minister of Canada. Clearly they’ve seen the writing on the wall with a ‘drill, baby, drill’ president in the Oval Office. Oil and gas stocks are soaring.
In a somewhat sour valedictory address last week President Biden lamented the concentration of immense power and extreme wealth in new oligarchs created by what he called a ‘tech-industrial complex’.
Biden consciously echoed President Eisenhower, who warned in his 1961 farewell address of the dangers of a ‘military-industrial complex’.
Biden, of course, was less critical of the tech bros when they were seen to be on his side – or doing his bidding when he pushed them to censor content he wanted suppressed. But there is a pertinent message in Biden’s remarks Trump would do well to heed.
When Trump won in 2016, it was dismissed as the last dying gasp of a white, working class which was about to be marginalised by a growing, dynamic, multi-ethnic America – which would inevitably lean Democrat.
In fact, something else happened that the Democrats were too blinkered to see: the white, working class was increasingly joined by pro-Trump working-to-middle-class Hispanic and black male voters, eventually by enough to give him a convincing victory last November.
Trump’s second term will be a success not by pandering to the tech bros, but by promoting the interests of this new, multi-ethnic Republican coalition.
Their interests are overwhelmingly in plenty of jobs – especially better-paid jobs – and rising living standards. That is why Team Trump is placing so much emphasis on revving up an already dynamic US economy with supply-side reforms, tax cuts and major deregulation. The more the economy grows, the more the real wages of the new Republican coalition will rise.
Trump wants ten regulations binned for every new one introduced. He wants to renew previous tax cuts due to end in 2026 and even add to them. He thinks tough controls at the southern border and mass deportation of illegal immigrants already in the country will tighten the labour market and raise wages, to his new coalition’s advantage. The 46 per cent of Hispanics and 25 per cent of black males who voted for him largely agree.
Trump is more focused and better prepared than 2016, when even he didn’t think he was going to win. Team Trump is more loyal, more onside than those he first appointed eight years ago, many of whom had their own agendas.
The transition period has been spent drafting an avalanche of executive orders – a paper ‘shock and awe’ as one Trumper put it – to be rolled out as early as this afternoon. Deportations of illegal immigrants with criminal records will be underway before the week is out.
Of course, it could all go quickly wrong. Trump is cavalier when it comes to tax and spend, which risks increasing the national debt and annual budget deficits, already far too high. That, in turn, risks breathing new life into inflation, requiring higher interest rates, neither of which would be good for Trump’s new constituency of ordinary strivers.
But the markets are comforted by the fact that in Scott Bessent he has a Treasury Secretary who will know what he’s doing.
In Marco Rubio he certainly has a Secretary of State who knows what he’s doing and whose presence means foreign policy might not be quite the rollercoaster many fear in Trump’s second term.
But fundamental change is coming. Trump wants to concentrate on bolstering America’s dominant position in the Western Hemisphere – hence all the talk of Panama, Canada and Greenland – while telling Europe, which is in for a rude awakening, it needs to take the lead in dealing with a revanchist Russia; and China is given more leeway in its East Pacific sphere of influence.
Europe, to its disgrace, remains in no shape to look after its own backyard even though it’s almost 80 years since it emerged from the ashes of World War II, and nobody can be sure how far China thinks its sphere of influence should extend into the Pacific.
Trump could crash and burn. That can’t be discounted. It is in the nature of the beast.
But America stands at a watershed and, against so many odds, he could be a transformative president.
The President who turns America away from endless obsessions about identity, gender and race – and places a renewed emphasis on opportunity, economic growth and dynamism.
The President who forces America’s European allies to realise they cannot for ever strangle their economies with spirit-sapping welfarism and stifling red tape – while still expecting America to pay for their security.
The President who created and consolidated a new, prosperous, confident Republican majority of all races which left the Democrats bereft of purpose.
It’s a tall order. But Inauguration Day is a time when Presidents get to think big and reveal ambitious finer possibilities for the country.
We must hope Trump spurns a repeat of the bleak image he outlined in his first inaugural address and puts base thoughts of vendettas against enemies behind him. A much bigger prize is within his grasp. He must not squander it.
