Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Jan. 20.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Surrounded by former presidents, nominated members of his new administration, and some of the richest people in the world, Donald J. Trump was sworn in, once again, as President of the United States.
And if inaugurations augur what is to come, it felt like a grim omen.
Inaugurations are spectacles and symbols of the peaceful transition of power in American democracy. The oath of office and the speech that follows can turn the page on a divisive election, as the president promises to uphold and govern through the will of the people. Indeed, most of the time, a newly sworn-in president will use this opportunity to lay out a vision for the nation, rife with abstract principles and lofty appeals to national unity.
During his first inauguration in January, 2017, Mr. Trump decidedly broke from that tradition. Telling the audience that he would stop the “American carnage” of the previous four years, Mr. Trump offered himself up as the only salve for a ravaged nation.
This time around, his messaging was not nearly as damning. Still, it retained variations on a theme: that only he can fix a broken America. “My election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom,” he declared. “From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
Of course, the idea of a country coming together to usher in a new era against a collective challenge can be unifying. This can be a kind of hope. Any mention of national unity, however, was at the behest of Mr. Trump. Whereas former president Barack Obama took care to acknowledge in his 2008 victory speech that democracy requires some degree of solidarity – that he still represented and served those who voted against him – Mr. Trump singled out and thanked those specific constituents who supported him in the election. The country is rapidly unifying, he claimed, but behind his agenda.
One nation, under Mr. Trump’s thumb.
Though he is a political figure characterized by unorthodoxy and unpredictability, the inauguration demonstrated that Mr. Trump intends to do exactly what he said he would do. Declaring from the outset that “America’s decline is over” and that his presidency will herald “the golden age of America,” Mr. Trump’s inaugural speech reaffirmed what we can expect from his administration.
Mr. Trump promised swift action through a series of executive orders signed on his first day in office. He will declare an emergency on the southern border, begin deportations, reinstate the “remain in Mexico policy,” designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and send American troops to enforce his agenda. He will also use the auspices of a national energy emergency to end the Green New Deal, revoke the electric vehicle mandate, and, in his words, “drill, baby, drill.” He will impose tariffs, stop government censorship, end diversity initiatives and declare there to be only two genders.
Some of Mr. Trump’s promises were, of course, ludicrous. To hear it from him, the new manifest destiny of the United States apparently involves taking back the Panama Canal, planting the American flag on Mars, and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But even though these are undeniably strange preoccupations for a newly inaugurated president, they make sense in the context of Mr. Trump’s tendency to deploy outlandish ideas, and to use bullish power moves to get his way.
The inauguration was, of course, not “liberation day” for many Americans. And the reference to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech while billionaires applauded politely – on the civil rights leader’s birthday, no less – was gut-wrenchingly perverse. The guardrails are gone this time around, and Mr. Trump’s first moves as President clearly demonstrate that he believes his mandate is to make his election promises a reality. In this initial preview of what is to follow, the next four years will be anything but a revolution of common sense.
As is his way, Mr. Trump rambled his way through many misleading or outright false statements in his speech. But he was right about at least one thing: that the election that brought him back to the Oval Office might be remembered as the most consequential in American history.