At noon ET on Monday, the US presidency changed hands, and one of the largest governments in the world rearranged itself in service to the petulance and vulgarity of the nation’s new president.
At the Pentagon, a portrait of a general who Donald Trump had found insufficiently deferential to him in his first term was removed from a wall; photographs of the empty spot circulated on social media. Trump was set to sign a bevvy of executive orders, pledging to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, to revoke policies promoting wind energy and electric cars, and to exert executive powers to speed up the construction of oil pipelines.
He was scheduled to revoke federal acknowledgement of transgender identity for the purposes of civil rights law, declaring in his inaugural address that “there are only two genders”. And Reproductiverights.gov, a federal web site aimed at helping women navigate abortion access, immediately went offline.
CBPOne, an app used by migrants to the US to manage their interactions with immigration officials, went dark when Trump was sworn in. An announcement posted on the programs website said that all existing appointments had been cancelled, leaving tens of thousands of people in the lurch. The press has reported that the new administration plans a series of high-profile raids in major cities this week, in search of immigrants to deport.
Latino businessowners in Chicago reported lost revenue as their clientele stayed home out of fear; a friend from college, a New York City public high school teacher, shared the instructions from her school administrators on how to protect her students in the event of an Ice raid. Meanwhile, Trump’s aides said he would issue an order ending birthright citizenship for the US-born children of immigrants, a move that would create a class of hundreds of thousands of un-Americans and move the concept of US citizenship from a legally protected status to something more akin to an inherited one.
It is not clear what authority, exactly, Trump has to do this; birthright citizenship, after all, is enshrined in the United States constitution. Like much of the inauguration’s declarations, the statements may be for show – grand pronouncements that will be muddled and eroded by the reality of policymaking, the grind of bureaucracy, the whittling-down of lawsuits.
Stephen Miller, the longtime Trump adviser and anti-immigrant crusader, has planned, according to the New York Times, a sort of shock-and-awe approach, hoping to issue as many executive orders and pursue as many maximalist policy changes as possible within the first days of the administration, hoping to terrify and exhaust the opposition. As is always the case with Trump, his statements are much grander than his actions. That doesn’t mean that his actions will not hurt people.
Trump returns to power with more loyal followers and more skittish, deferential and frightened enemies. The Republican party has been reshaped in his image, and so have the courts: just last summer, the US supreme court, including all three of Trump’s first-term nominees, voted to make him virtually immune from criminal prosecution for acts taken in office.
He has pledged to pardon all the convicted January 6 insurrectionists, and to halt prosecutions of those not yet convicted. And he is likely to use his authority over federal law enforcement to pursue civil and criminal proceedings against his enemies. On his way out the door, Joe Biden made a point of preemptively pardoning lawmakers who had investigated the January 6 attack, to protect them from Trump’s reprisals. The Democrats are weak, fractured, embittered and scared; the same consultants whose advice lost them the 2024 election are now telling them to defer to Trump, abandon resistance, and shift to the right. So far, many of them appear to be listening. The others are pointing fingers at one another.
Right now the money is on Trump, and the money is substantial. The three richest men in the world – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – all sat in the front row at Trump’s inauguration. (His cabinet members were in the second.) The men are there to court lucrative government contracts and discourage regulation of their businesses, but they also appear willing to commit themselves to Trump’s ideological project, especially with regards to gender, and to wield the massive communications platforms that they control to further his culture war agenda.
Bezos has intervened at the Washington Post to tilt the editorial slant in Trump’s favor; Zuckerberg has removed many sex, sexuality and gender protections from the content moderation policies of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. Musk, meanwhile, is reportedly slated to be given an office in the West Wing, though he has no official government job. Speaking at a rally of Trump supporters held at an arena after the official inauguration ceremony, the billionaire effusively thanked the crowd in his mealy South African accent. Musk then jerked a flat hand from his chest into the air, in a gesture that resembled a Nazi salute.
There is something broken in the soul when such spectacles can no longer shock you. But I confess that they no longer shock me. America is ruled, now, by men who are extremely psychologically transparent: their resentment and greed, their desperate, seeking needfulness, their insecurity and rage at those who provoke it; these things seep off these men, like a stench. They are evil men, and pathetic ones: mentally small, morally ugly. They are relentlessly predictable.
Here is another prediction: these men will not succeed in all their schemes. They will not deport as many people as they say they will; he will not change the law as much as they pledge to; they will not, cannot, capture the institutions as completely, or bury dissent as successfully. They cannot do everything they aim to do. Because politics is not over; because our institutions are not all collapsed; and because the existing institutions are not the only methods of resistance and refusal.
The Trumpist movement that ascended to power on Monday is relying on a tired, defeated America, one too diminished to do anything but submit to their demands and schemes. But the American spirit is indefatigable: it loves freedom and equality, abhors tyranny, values minding your own business and hates, above all, to be told what to do. When Trump was last in office, Americans found, at the end, that they did not like it. They will not like it now, either, and that dislike, however tardy, will have political consequences.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
