Donald Trump is back baby! Bigger, bolder, brassier than ever before.
This was a second term presidential inauguration like no other we’ve ever seen. Speaking for the plain American and the sometimes forgotten majority, Trump was Action Man, driven by impatience to get going.
Trump knows how Washington works now, he knows he’s got a limited time in office and he’s going to revolutionise America and its politics in double quick time.
Love him or hate him, you have to admire Trump’s energy and stamina. Approaching 80, he undertook countless events, even answering journalists’ questions without teleprompters as he signed a slew of executive orders. The contrast with the sheltered workshop and acute teleprompter dependence of the Biden presidency was staggering.
Having cheated an assassin’s bullet, having escaped the earnest efforts of Joe Biden and a swag of other Democratic Party government leaders and prosecutors to put him in jail, Trump looked as though he wanted to change the whole world in one day.
He withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords. Inflation, he told his fellow Americans, was caused by excess government spending and bad energy policy.
Trump reversed a wide range of Biden environmental policies and declared the US was going to use every bit of its vast oil and gas endowments: “Drill, baby, drill!”
This move alone up-ends all the politics and financial and other calculations of climate change action globally. European governments have been collapsing over inflation and energy prices. Meanwhile, the big and growing economies – the US, China, India, Indonesia and many others – while they pay differing degrees of lip service to climate change action, are using every energy supply available to them to power development.
Whether they like that development or not, Western governments, including the Albanese government, will have to face it eventually.
Trump declared an emergency on the US southern border, which enables him to mobilise the military and other arms of US power to stop illegal immigration.
Trump said he strongly favours legal immigration. He wants investment, companies and skilled workers to come into the US. But he’s determined to stamp out illegal immigration. Pure common sense.
Some of these actions will be subject to legal challenge. But Trump’s Republicans control the Senate and the House of Representatives. He has a clear mandate for these policies and it will be intensely undemocratic if they’re held up.
Trump declared he would build the biggest and strongest military the world had ever seen: “Our friends will respect us, our enemies will fear us.” The single overriding objective of the military, Trump said, would be its ability to defeat the country’s enemies. In policy areas like energy, illegal immigration and military policy, there is a thread of common sense that runs through much of what Trump says. This is the strength of populism if it’s intelligently managed. What kind of mental delusion ever led Biden to institute an effective open border on the southern flank of the US? No normal person possessed of average intelligence, prudence, the wisdom of experience or the most elementary common sense could ever have done that.
In this area, Trump gives expression to American common sense. Similarly, he promised “a colourblind and merit-based society”. Who, other than a professional ideologue, could seriously disagree with that?
Trump was right to say that “a corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth” from the American people while being increasingly unable to fulfil basic tasks of government.
There was of course some over statement, dodgy facts, dubious judgments among the thousands upon thousands of words that Trump spoke on inauguration day. But for large slabs of what he had to say, tens of millions of Americans would have been nodding their heads at what were really statements of the obvious.
Trump’s remarkable success is a tribute to his determined will and genuine courage, but it’s also a huge tribute to Biden’s manifold failures. On many of these policy areas, Trump had effectively won the debate before the campaign began.
Similarly, Trump’s promise to restore law and order in big cities resonates with Americans, especially in cities with Democrat mayors and Democrat state governments. Liberal crime policies and anti-police reflexes have been a disaster, especially for residents of poor neighbourhoods.
Trump looks to have overstepped, however, in pardoning too many of the January 6 rioters. There was clearly a double standard in their sentencing, but if some of them commit violent offences after they’ve been released, Trump will rightly pay a heavy political price.
Biden’s farewell decision to pre-emptively pardon all his siblings and their partners from any prosecution was pathetic and confirms just how politicised were the prosecutions launched against Trump by Biden’s Justice Department and other Democrat office holders.
Democrats screamed that whoever may have launched the prosecutions against Trump, they were all taking place in real courts so could not be considered political and all would observe fair process. But that rule apparently doesn’t apply to Biden’s family, or anyone else on the Democrat side.
No one has done more to debauch the constitution or the rule of law in the US than Biden. What Trump makes of these precedents in the fullness of time remains to be seen.
But the big takeout from Inauguration Day is that this is going to be a high-octane, high-energy, consequential presidency. Hold on to your hats.
More Coverage
Ukraine accuses Russia of strike on civilians
Russia killed 13 people in targeted missile and drone strikes on a boarding school sheltering Ukrainian civilians.
World ‘counting on’ you for Middle East peace: Egypt’s Sisi tells Trump
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told his US counterpart he could secure a ‘historic peace agreement’ and end conflict in the wartorn region.