Donald Trump’s Inaugural Day of Vindication

Donald Trump’s most enduring theme is himself—it always was and always will be. He is the Poet Laureate of self-aggrandizement. Hyperbole is how he lives and breathes. Everything he does is the greatest, the strongest, the boldest. On the eve of his return to the White House, the first ex-President in more than a century to reclaim the office, he promised thousands of red-hatted supporters at a rally in Washington “the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first hundred days of any Presidency in American history.” No need to wait for history to render its judgment. Back in November, when he defeated Kamala Harris only four years after being repudiated by the voters, he had declared his comeback win a result of “the greatest political movement of all time,” and promised that his second term in office would become “the golden age of America.”

Trump, who first gained fame in the nineteen-eighties for erecting a gilded skyscraper bearing his name in New York, returned to the theme of a golden age on Monday, in an Inaugural Address that, again and again, conflated himself and the country he will once again lead. The speech included a remarkable statement—that the Supreme Being had called this noted sinner back to power. “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any President in our two-hundred-and-fifty-year history,” Trump claimed—a reference, I suppose, to the two assassination attempts he faced during the 2024 campaign and the multiple legal challenges that eventually made him the first convicted felon ever to be elected President. His conclusion? “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Trump never mentioned his predecessor by name, but he could not have been more pointed about January 20th as “Liberation Day” from Joe Biden, a man who, four years ago, promised to return the country to normalcy after Trump’s chaotic and dysfunctional first term, but who instead set the stage for Trump’s return. The country, on Biden’s watch, had suffered “a horrible betrayal,” Trump said, and he began his speech lamenting “America’s decline,” an echo of his famous “American Carnage” address from 2017. His catalogue of the previous Administration’s failings included everything from immigration policy to an education system that, he claimed, teaches kids “to hate our country.” But, as always, Trump’s biggest passion was for the things that touched him personally, nothing more so than what he said was Biden’s “vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department” against him and his supporters.

Trump’s many personal grievances—and his obvious delight in the vindication that his victory represents—are what made this Inauguration so different from any of its predecessors, including his first one, eight years ago. His 2017 Inaugural Address was the shortest recent Inaugural; Monday’s was the longest in recent memory, clocking in at twenty-nine minutes. It was overtly partisan and explicitly self-promotional—the marriage of a campaign rally and a State of the Union, with not much more than a token nod to the aspirational rhetoric that is usually the sum total of such speeches. Past Presidents have used the occasion to speak of the better angels of our nature, to banish fear and summon the best of America. Trump offered “drill, baby, drill,” and a pledge to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Previous Inaugurals have been brief, elegiac, inspirational; Trump’s was rambling, incoherent, and blustery. What, in the end, should we think about a speech that essentially threatened war against Panama but never even mentioned the deadly conflict in Europe that he once promised to end in his first twenty-four hours back in power?

It was always going to be a day of dissonance. But Trump’s swearing-in at the Capitol Rotunda, driven indoors by frigid weather, offered certain benefits of clarity—illuminating, among other things, who rates in his second Administration and who does not. The image of America’s wealthiest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—standing in front of Trump’s incoming Cabinet, and right behind Trump’s own children, was a revealing chart of power in the new Washington. The absence of a cheering throng of Trump’s MAGA supporters only reinforced the notion of an emergent and dangerous tech “oligarchy,” as Biden warned about last week, in a farewell address filled with barbs at his successor. More traditional powers, such as America’s governors, were relegated to the overflow room. Take that, Ron DeSantis.

But, on Monday, it was Biden as much as Trump who offered a sharp illustration of the day’s contradictory messages. Before breakfast, the outgoing President announced that he had preëmptively pardoned many of those atop Trump’s list of enemies—such as the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who defied Trump, and the members of the House January 6th Committee who investigated him. A couple of hours later, Biden stood on the White House steps to warmly greet the man who had prompted him to take such an unprecedented step. “Welcome home,” he said. Less than an hour after that, Biden, a President who had repeatedly chided Trump as a threat to democratic norms, pardoned five of his own family members as his final act in office, an exercise of personal power that made even many of his Democratic allies uncomfortable. It wasn’t even noon, and the day felt dizzying.

Most disorienting of all might have been the painful memories conjured by the setting for the ceremony itself, inside the Capitol where, four years and two weeks ago, a violent insurrection of Trump supporters sought to block certification of Biden’s victory. Trump did not mention the January 6th rioters in his speech at the rotunda, but, later on Monday, he was preparing to pardon or commute the sentences of many of those who were charged for their role that day, fulfilling a campaign-season pledge to those whom he now calls heroes and martyrs. This, too, was clarifying.

Trump’s return to power, in a crime scene born of his own refusal to concede defeat, is, for me at least, the day’s unforgettable image, the thing that I’ll remember long after his promise to “end the electric-vehicle mandate,” which does not exist, or rename an Alaskan mountain peak after his fellow tariff-loving President William McKinley. This is who Trump is. I laughed out loud on Monday morning at the Wall Street Journal’s preview of Trump’s speech, which promised it would be “optimistic” and upbeat. It was not. And yet I am also quite convinced that Trump’s followers—that not-quite fifty per cent of the electorate that returned him to power—will soon enough find a way to forgive him, as they did for the unforgivable events of January 6th, when he falls short, as he inevitably must, of his extravagant promises of magical transformation.

There is still much that we don’t know about Trump’s next four years, of course, and it would be foolish to issue predictions, given a first term that featured two impeachments, a global pandemic, and the 2020 election he refused to accept. But Trump’s own Inaugural Address has shown us that the key fact about his second term is the same as his first—for this President, it’s always all about him. ♦