Cold Bedevils Presidential Inauguration Day, Washington, DC tends to be chilly during the third week of January. A New Yorker correspondent in 1965 (at Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration) wore “red, white and blue thermal underwear.” A magazine dispatch (Jimmy Carter’s Dispatch) from 1977 said, “Sparkling white ice everywhere.” Organizers of the 2025 iteration (Donald Trump, Reprise) moved the event indoors. In: The First Family, visually punctuated by 6-foot-7-inch, 18-year-old Barron Trump, sitting behind the president. Billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai also sit next in line, as well as communes from abroad: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s Javier Mailei. Signed into the Capitol visitor center is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who enjoys broadly comparable influence over Trump’s Republican Party at this point in 2023, and whose sideline has been around for a very long time. It was a reminder of the year. Politics.
8 years is even longer. In the Rotunda, Trump said that since his first election, “I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 200-and-a-half-year history. And I have overcome more along the way.” ” Perhaps more importantly, his movement learned: the virtue of preparation. Detailed policies and employment programs were being negotiated and assembled. “For American citizens, January 20, 2025 is Emancipation Day,” Trump said.
If not then, it was the day of the executive order. The documents flowed. At the Resolute Desk, an aide handed it to Trump and ordered him to sign from a tall stack of navy blue binders. Within hours, the United States was withdrawing not only from the Paris Climate Accords but also from the World Health Organization, which it helped discover in 1948. For asylum seekers; ice agents were reportedly going door to door in Detroit’s Latino neighborhoods. Several federal diversity programs dating back to an executive order signed by LBJ in 1965 were eliminated. Offshore wind projects have been suspended and restrictions on drilling have been lifted. 1,500 people were pardoned for their roles on January 6, including some of the most violent actors. Politico speculated that many would immediately run for themselves.
Some initiatives sounded less like fixes to bureaucratic procedures (within the scope of normal orders) than something like a start-up society manual. The basic rules had been rewritten. Trump declared that America’s policy is that there are only two genders: male and female. Anyone born in the United States has been a citizen since the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868, but on Monday, Trump signed a document declaring that this is no longer the case. You are not an American if you are in the country illegally or legally but only temporarily. The effect of these executive orders will be much more effective than in 2017, from the solidity of U.S. borders and the solidity of the jury to the solidity of who becomes an American citizen, much more than an open season with virtually nothing. Guaranteed to communicate effectively.
Meanwhile, we are waiting for a deal. Trump’s instinct is to make deals, and he has his sights set on Greenland (and its mineral deposits) and the Panama Canal. (“America’s ships are severely overcharged,” he claimed during a long riff in his inaugural address, in which he vowed, “We’ll get it back.”), and a policy of high tariffs. (Tiktok CEO Shou Zi Chew also indicated that if Beijing sells 50% of TikTok to US investors, it will forget all about it.) (Also in the Rotunda sitting next to Gabbard.) Were these gambits made on behalf of the country, or specific supporters, or Trump himself? At least the president’s family a few days before the inauguration. They launched the $Trump meme coin, which soared to $15 billion a few days before the inauguration before dropping in half.
Of course, Trump will always be Trump, but it’s the way much of the country has emerged from the pandemic that has given the president a second political life. I noticed rules, strictures, all types of instructions, and the principles behind them. . What was once a niche campaign against diversity and inclusion programs has metastasized into general anti-naturalism. By pardoning Ross Ulbricht, the violent January 6th criminal and the creator of the crypto-enabled online drug bazaar Silk Road, Trump said he believes accountability I made it clear that I had to decide. In particular, some billionaires appeared to detect a social shift in Trump’s election. Shortly after canceling his meta fact-checking program, Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the “culturally emasculated” corporate world could use more “masculine energy,” adding, ” It’s good to celebrate a little more aggression. It only took a few days for the new president to take that sentiment and run with it through the rule of law.
Is he going too far for his own good again? Trump is often self-railing (like last time with the Muslim ban and the never-ending boon on the wall), and even his supporters of the Fraternal Order of Police last week, January 6 denounced the pardon of the day. Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to block the threatened executive order, which a federal judge temporarily blocked on Thursday. And Trump had to endure a sermon from Bishop Marian Budd, who urged him to show compassion for “those who are scared right now.” It is disconcerting and alarming to recall how fierce the resistance was to Trump’s first presidential act in 2017, how we find ourselves responding to protests and a much more divisive agenda. So far it has been marked primarily by a lone female voice from the pulpit. In just one week, Trump seems right that he has learned a lot from the past eight years. This January, what is missing is heat. ♦
