Newsday
DONALD TRUMP, 78, walked into the rotunda of the US Capitol on January 20, having threatened to be a dictator from day one. But with an inaugural address that signalled his intention to marginalise and alienate all who do not support him, he went further.
It is God, he said, who freed him from the justice system and saved him from an assassin’s bullet. It is God who put him back into the White House to make America great again. Clothed in divine right, he is like King Louis XIV of France.
“Nothing,” Mr Trump decreed, “will stand in our way.” In other words, l’état, c’est moi.
But Mr Trump is not America. His margin of victory in the 2024 election was just over two million votes. It was enough to take the electoral college decisively and flip the swing states. Yet it was the second-closest election since 1968. His is no overwhelming mandate.
On the contrary, the election result places an enormous duty on the 47th president to serve not just the 77 million who voted for him, but also the 75 million who voted for Kamala Harris. And yet, there was absolutely no attempt to speak to Democrats, with Mr Trump falsely claiming “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda.”
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In fact, that agenda is one of the most polarising and destructive ever in modern American history.
“Millions and millions” of immigrants will be sent back to where they came from. The US will revert to being “colour blind and merit based.” Ending now will be “radical political theories and social experiments” in the military. Oil drilling will be ramped up. The Panama Canal will be wrested from China.
Yet, border crossings have long plunged; Mr Trump’s main cabinet picks are dramatically unqualified; all people are subject to the same entry standards in the military, including women; the US is already the world’s top oil producer; and Panama, not China, runs the canal.
Dictator or no, Mr Trump is certainly a demagogue.
His additional announcement that under a new “golden age” there will only be two genders speaks to stirring up prejudice, not appealing to reason. His avalanche of executive orders signed by nightfall breathed cynical life into the Republican Party’s promise of shock and awe: gone is US involvement in the Paris Agreement and the World Health Organization.
But Mr Trump’s pardoning of January 6 rioters, who sought to derail democracy and who fatally attacked police officers in the same building he took his oath in, is particularly ominous.
As is his almost flippant late-night remark to a White House pool reporter: “We are looking at Venezuela very strongly.”
