WASHINGTON, D.C. — There’s a crackle of retribution in the air.
Get on side — that’s the message from MAGA loyalists. And Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and host of the influential “War Room” podcast, means to do everything he can to ensure that new converts, the belated joiners from the tech and banking sectors, aren’t able to sidetrack the movement as they now genuflect to Trump.
Back in the day, the 71-year-old hunted Russian submarines in the Pacific as a naval surface warfare officer. “I wasn’t hunting boomers,” he told POLITICO — a reference to ballistic missile submarines. “We were hunting Soviet fast attack subs to protect the carrier battle group.” And today, his mission is to protect USS Trump from being diverted.
That’s the fervent wish of Trump’s loyalists who flocked to D.C. for Monday’s presidential inauguration. Despite the brutally frigid temperature, which forced the swearing-in ceremony inside for the first time since 1985, the MAGA supporters who gathered in the capital were triumphant and giddy at Trump’s (at times, improbable) political resurrection.
To see him back strikes them as confirming their time has truly come — that Trump 2.0 will turn the clock back to the future: No more liberal status quo and critical race theory. No more woke diversity and inclusion. No more forever wars and allies short-changing America. No more immigrants and no more green subsidies — just “drill, baby, drill.”
Supporters could’ve hardly cared that many local residents in this heavily Democratic city were shunning inaugural attendees — they were too busy relishing the prospect of settling scores with Democrats and Republican turncoats.
“If Biden thinks preemptive pardons are going to save them, he’s got another thing coming,” a middle-aged Trump acolyte from North Carolina, sporting a pair of red-white-and-blue MAGA Sneakers, told POLITICO. A Republican lawyer, attending a star-studded event hosted by conservative cable commentary site Newsmax, echoed the sentiment: “We’re already examining how we can get around any pardons Biden issues.”
Along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capital Grille restaurant — a longtime haunt of Republican lawmakers, their staff and GOP lobbyists — was crowded in the days leading up to the inauguration. “We did it,” chuckled a Trump donor as he surveyed his boisterous fellow revelers. The huge lobby bar at Trump’s old hotel, now the Astoria Waldorf, was packed too.
There are two faces to any U.S. presidential inauguration. On one side are the rich, powerful and connected; the foreign dignitaries with supersized black SUVs cleared to whisk them through downtown’s locked-down security zone to inaugural parties and meetings.
Then, there are the rank-and-file supporters of the winning party. Wearing transparent plastic raincoats, they have to brave the weather conditions and slosh around icy sidewalks, often being misdirected by police transferred from other cities and states to assist the security operation — it’s a far cry from the well-heeled taking high tea in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, listening to harp music a stone’s throw from the White House.
But with this inauguration, more than any other, there’s sense of a profound break with the past. The crowd who’ve descended on Washington, donning their red MAGA hats, Trump-adorned shirts and American-flag regalia, seem more like an army of sans-culottes — the working-class who played a significant role in the French Revolution.
They feel they’ve conquered, and they mean to take the nation’s capital back.
Whether that’s how it will play out isn’t clear, though. As Trump bragged at a campaign-style pre-inaugural rally on Sunday night, his electoral coalition has expanded. Railing against his adversaries, from Democrats to journalists and immigrants to never-Trump Republicans, he promised his cheering supporters: “Once and for all, we’re going to end the reign of a failed and corrupt political establishment in Washington, a failed administration.”
Other speakers at the raucous rally were even more belligerent, denouncing opponents who stood in Trump’s way. “They did everything they could to stop this movement, and they failed,″ Eric Trump, the president son, said.
“Accountability is coming,” said senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller. “The whole federal bureaucracy is about to learn that they don’t work for themselves; they work for you, they work for President Trump, and they work for the American people. We are about to get our country back and our democracy back.”
But a bigger coalition risks tensions and flare-ups. The MAGA crowd may like the spectacle of tech and Wall Street titans coming to them cap-in-hand, but who will co-opt who? Republicans have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but the five-seat majority they have in the House of Representatives will make life difficult — and Trump strategists have already walked away from attempting what Trump dubbed “one big, beautiful bill” to enact a huge raft of reforms.
“At the moment Trump doesn’t have to choose between competing parts of his coalition,” Sean Spicer, a former Trump aide who served as press secretary for part of the president’s first term, told POLITICO. “There’s nothing making him have to pick … at the moment.”
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