Eight years ago, Trump’s first inauguration was mired in claims that he was installed via Russian interference. More than 60 Democrats refused to attend. While his defeated opponent, Hillary Clinton, did turn up, she would later label him an ‘illegitimate president’. Back then, Trump was greeted by thousands of protesters in DC, kicking off the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ movement. Rancour and anxiety were in the air, as many were not sure what the brash real-estate developer would bring to the White House or to the world.
This time around, the mood could not have been more different. Trump’s second inauguration found Americans in a hopeful frame of mind, with many celebrating his return. The protests this week in Washington were desultory; the Resistance has become the Resignation. Indeed, the quiet, defeatist response to Trump reveals the Democrats as an exhausted party – as politically frail and confused as Joe Biden is physically frail and confused.
This exhaustion comes because Biden and the Democrats did not just lose an election in November – their worldview was rejected, too. It was as much a moral as a political defeat. Ever since the 2016 election, the Democrats had single-mindedly pursued a crusade to delegitimise Trump. This carried through to the run-up to the 2024 election, as they waged a campaign of lawfare that sought to throw him in jail. Instead of mounting substantive arguments against his programme and policies, they thought branding him beyond the pale – as a convicted felon, a Nazi even – would be enough.
Then came Trump’s decisive victory in November. It marked one of the greatest comebacks in American political history. He won all seven swing states and the popular vote. More than that, the election showed that the American public clearly rejected the Democrats’ claim that Trump was illegitimate. Now, devoid of that delegitimising strategy, the Democrats are in shock and speechless, struggling to come to terms with the fact that Trump has been sworn in for a second time.
With his foes in disarray, Trump now stands triumphant, and that showed in his second inauguration speech. ‘The golden age of America begins right now’, he declared at the start. He continued in an upbeat and hopeful vein throughout his address. It was certainly lighter in tone compared with his speech eight years ago, when he talked gloomily of ‘carnage’ in America’s cities. ‘I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success’, he said yesterday. You might say this was just wishful rhetoric, but there really does seem to be a more optimistic mood in the country right now. There is a noticeable ‘vibe shift’. Trump’s words do have wider resonance.
Looking to the future, Trump promised an era of growth – not just economic growth, but perhaps geographic expansion, too – in order to restore ‘history’s greatest civilisation’. For Trump, this also means expanding the nation’s energy supply, as well as demolishing the Democrats’ Green New Deal and revoking their electric-vehicle mandate. At the same time, Trump stressed the need for America to restore its borders. He said he would stop illegal immigration, deport criminals, send troops to the southern border and designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
Of course, this being a Trump speech, it wasn’t devoid of anger, and he didn’t pull any punches. With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting near him, he ripped into the outgoing administration: ‘We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad… We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defence of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people.’
Indeed, the Biden-Harris regime had become so stifling and oppressive that its demise in November has generated a huge sense of relief among Americans. In his speech, Trump listed off the ways in which he would dismantle this vast bureaucratic apparatus, sounding like he was tearing down so many Berlin Walls. He promised to end ‘years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression’ and to stop the weaponisation of the justice system. ‘Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponised to persecute political opponents – something I know something about’, he said.
Trump called his first-day executive actions ‘a revolution of common sense’, which was fair enough in some cases. With Democrats having gone to such crazy culture-war extremes, Donald Trump’s agenda really does seem more ‘normal’ by comparison. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to gender ideology. In his speech, Trump vowed to restore a sane understanding of the sexes: ‘As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.’ You could almost hear people shout, ‘Yes, finally, the truth!’.
Most remarkably, Trump neutralised the Democrats’ main claim to moral superiority – namely, the race issue. He thanked black and Hispanic Americans, reminding us how many from these communities voted for him. With his second inauguration coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr Day, he pledged to ‘strive together to make [King’s] dream a reality’. At the same time, he promised to end the Democrats’ DEI regime and the policy of ‘trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life’. Echoing King, he said, ‘we will forge a society that is colourblind and merit-based’. Censorship, lawfare, gender ideology, DEI… it may not be the end of them, but it seems like Trump could at least be ushering in the beginning of the end of these regressive trends.
While Trump’s most ardent MAGA fans are celebrating his inauguration, the rest of the population are simply breathing a sigh of relief – relief that the woke elite, fronted by Biden and Harris, is no longer calling the shots. It’s like a weight is off our backs. People don’t know for sure what Trump will do, or how he will respond to the challenges that lie ahead. But at this moment, there is some space, a possibility, to get our living standards and society back on track, now that we’re free from the dead hand of the Democratic and cultural elite.
It’s a new world. Trump is back – get used to it. In time, maybe the American people will be back, too.
Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.
This post was originally published on here
