Inaugural Addresses ordinarily dwell on the art of the possible.
But one of Donald Trump’s most revealing lines on Monday was about the art of the impossible.
“Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” said 45 as he morphed into 47. “But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken.”
Here I am. It was both a boast and a warning.
When the reality show star burst onto the political scene in 2015, flouting all the rules, he was regarded as a clown by some and a dilemma by others, including many Republicans.
When he was elected in 2016, many assumed he was an anomaly, a deviation from the new political movement that Barack Obama represented.
But now it is the Obama coalition that looks like the anomaly and Trump who is the page-turning force in history.
He’s riding back into town as master and commander of the entire fleet, with de facto control over all three branches of government, with Republicans more compliant than ever and Democrats helpless in the face of his dominance. Trump has them all just where he wants them.
Ever since he came out of Queens, a pushy kid ensorcelled by the Manhattan skyline with family money but few social tools to climb the society ladder, Trump has been obsessed with larger-than-life men who dominated others. He modeled his behavior on them.
Flash back to the ’70s, when Trump dressed in a three-piece burgundy suit with matching shoes and a matching limousine and hung out with Roy Cohn and George Steinbrenner. His biographer Gwenda Blair said Trump was like “this strapping lad from the provinces who comes to the city, like a figure out of Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions.’”
But on Inauguration Day, those illusions were found. Here were America’s tech tycoons, members of his court, in a pantheon at his second Inaugural Address, directly across from the former presidents and in front of Trump’s presumptive cabinet. Many members of Congress, the actual elected government, were relegated to the cheaper seats.
The men who control Americans’ communications, eyeballs and, often, emotions got the choicest seats; several have scarfed up big mansions in Washington to be closer to the Oval.
Elon Musk sat behind the vice president’s mother, pumping his arms and giving two thumbs-up when Trump said he’d put an American flag on Mars, where Musk wants to die (just not on impact).
Google’s Sundar Pichai was near Don Jr. and next to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, who were near Ivanka and Jared. Shou Zi Chew, the TikTok C.E.O., sat next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s intended director of national intelligence. Tim Cook of Apple was close to Barron Trump. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, was also at the inaugural but — perhaps because of his legal duel with Elon — was in the overflow room with Ron DeSantis, Eric Adams and Conor McGregor.
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump crowed, but it’s more like the second Gilded Age, given the flock of billionaires in his posse. In the old days, the robber barons dealt in railroads and steel and oil, things America needed to grow. These tech giants have warped America with their social media sites and may end up destroying it with unregulated A.I. (They’re developing A.I. too fast to find a kill switch.)
Trump’s 2017 inaugural was sparse on celebrities and titans. Now he’s grooving with the Village People, saluting a member in erotic chaps. With his undeniable electoral triumph, he has finally flipped the dynamic, and he is the most powerful of them all. His nose is no longer pressed against the glass. And he relishes rubbing our noses in it.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”
Across from the joyous tech gods was the bitter band of fallen foes. You could see in the faces of Trump’s predecessors and vanquished rivals that they still couldn’t accept that Trump was more in touch with America than they were. They were left to use a buddy system of whispered asides and frozen faces to get through the noon hour, and soon they were gone.
Eight years ago, Trump’s “American carnage” speech was a blowtorch to the body politic, wildly off-key from the standard patriotic, aspirational swearing-in fare.
But that was a bouquet of lilies compared with the detailed, explicit, radical and transformational-cum-transactional vision of America that Trump outlined Monday.
He claimed that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda,” which is not true. It’s just that Democrats are flatlining right now; they’re in shambles.
He signed a pack of executive orders that are bound to divide, including withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and World Health Organization and attempting to end birthright citizenship. To keep people guessing, he did make a few feints at harmony, saying he would strive to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream a reality.” Michelle Obama was smart to skip the speech.
Trump started with a repudiation of everybody sitting in the front two rows on his left. As Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, the Clintons and George W. Bush listened, trying to keep muted expressions, Trump unleashed a withering denunciation of American leaders who have created a “crisis of trust.”
Hillary broke character, laughing derisively when Trump vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. But his audience did not take it as a joke; they cheered.
“For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” the newly minted president said, ignoring the irony of the pack of rapacious moguls beside him. “We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”
He said he would backtrack on what those sitting next to him had wrought.
“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place,” he said.
And that mandate, he said, is not only from the voters; it is nothing less than divine.
“Just a few months ago, in that beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said. “But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
While the Inaugural Addresses of J.F.K. and Obama were about new generations rising to power, propelling America into the future, Trump’s speech played to nostalgia: It was designed to reassure Americans who are alarmed at perceived radical social change, who think that our society has been moving too fast, making them feel alienated in their own country.
He promised to restore the name of Mount McKinley from its Indigenous name, Denali, and threatened to take back the Panama Canal. He evoked the glory days of the space race when he vowed “to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” He dismissed D.E.I. programs, promising to make society “colorblind and merit-based,” and also declared, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
The last time Trump took power, he was treated as the rube from reality TV about to get a schooling in the way real power works. His big promises and brazen musings, his impulsive executive actions and disregard for process were viewed as vulnerabilities by an establishment confident that he would fail. He had raved about getting rid of the Electoral College, and the establishment was happy to have him preoccupied with dead-end distractions.
At his second inaugural, Trump was no longer the outlier and accidental president. He is now the consummate insider who knows better how to exercise power.
Democrats complain that Trump and Melania are grifters who used the occasion of the inauguration to launch their cryptocurrency meme coins and rake in millions. Amazon also paid $40 million for Melania’s documentary.
But labeling the Trumps as grifters does not have the same punch when Joe Biden followed up his pardon of Hunter with Inauguration Day pardons of his three siblings and two of their spouses. Which raises the question of why his siblings needed the pardons. The news broke just before Trump started talking.
Brimming with confidence, master of his domain, Trump gave a second speech in Emancipation Hall, used as the overflow room, where Republican governors and other B-listers were gathered.
This was his sweet spot, an “Inside the Actors Studio” analysis of his first speech, including praise for the “best acoustics I think I have ever heard in a room” and the 72-degree temperature in the Rotunda, which he declared was far better than the freezing weather outside.
First, naturally, he gave himself props, saying, “We’re getting great reviews on the speech.”
Ever the showman, he said he would give this audience “the A-plus treatment,” not the “A treatment, the B treatment, the C, the D or the F. You know what the F is? ‘Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Bye-bye.’” But as we all know, Trump is a man who loves to talk about himself, Castro-esque in his volubility, so he never does an F treatment.
He offered the inside story of his Inaugural Address, saying that Melania and JD Vance had persuaded him to take out praise for the Jan. 6 rioters, whom he referred to as “hostages.”
It certainly would have been creepy if he had said he was pardoning them while he was making his address in the very Capitol they ransacked — an attempted coup that led to Trump’s second impeachment. (He would commute the sentence of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, and pardon roughly 1,500, nearly all of those charged in the attack, before the Commander in Chief Ball.)
There was a vivid reminder of that bloody day when Mike Pence walked into the Rotunda with Dan Quayle. When Trump was pressuring Pence not to certify Biden’s win, Pence called the former vice president and fellow Indianan to ask his advice. Quayle told him, “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”
Setting aside his promise of unity, Trump trashed his foes who tried to hold him to account for Jan. 6, including Liz Cheney (“She’s a crying lunatic”), Adam Kinzinger (“a super crier”) and Nancy Pelosi (“guilty as hell”). He was more benign about Hillary, noting “She didn’t look too happy today” but allowing that she’s “a very nice person.”
Then, giving us whiplash, he reverted to a flight of fancy about himself as a unifier, saying he told Chuck Schumer, “Chuck, I think it’s time we all start getting along a little bit, because it doesn’t make sense.” He added to the crowd, “I mean, we literally never get a Democrat vote. They never get a Republican vote, almost.”
Trump lapsed more into meandering — or “the weave,” as he calls it — by the minute. He shared some breaking news about Melania: While she may walk better in five-inch heels than anyone on Earth, as the Vogue bella figura André Leon Talley said, she does sometimes feel the pinch. (Stars, they’re just like us!)
“I shouldn’t say this. I’m going to get hell when I say this, but her feet are absolutely aching,” he confided to the crowd. “You know, those heels.” He added, “She said, ‘Darling, I love you so much, but my feet are killing me.”
Trump no longer seemed afraid of what he didn’t know about Washington. Now he was happy to tout what he knew to Washington.
Seeing Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, in the crowd, he went on a very long exegesis about building the border wall in Texas. He sounded like a beat poet of concrete.
“I love construction,” he said. “I wanted that sucker to go up maybe 50, 60 feet. It would have looked beautiful. A nice Y shape. And they said the problem is, sir, they climbed that like a rabbit.” He has to be the only president who ever rhapsodized about “rebar” in his Inauguration Day remarks.
For me, the most striking moment Monday came when members of the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they marched down the aisle of the Rotunda. Trump swayed to the song as the glee club belted out the lyric “His truth is marching on.”
Here I am, Trump said. He is in control as we’ve never seen him. The “Battle Hymn” lyric evoked a serious question amid the pomp: Given Trump’s talent for lying, will truth be marching on — or out?
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