The most sacred ceremony conducted at the Trump inauguration undoubtedly for Donald Trump personally, with its mystical meaning elevating him to his greatest height as an emperor, was the prayer for Fred Trump. Father Frank Mann, a retired priest from Brooklyn, offered a blessing to the ruthless real estate operator who made his fortune in the borough and bankrolled his son’s pilgrimage over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan to blow a half-billion dollars through six bankruptcies and the financial collapse of the Taj Mahal Hotel and Trump Castle casino in Jersey City, and a blessing for Fred’s wife, too, without whom “this day would never be the miracle that has just begun”.
Father Frank had struck up a relationship with Donald after he sent him a photograph of how he had weeded the Trump family gravesite at the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery. A single tombstone marks not only Donald’s parents, but also Fred’s father and mother, Donald’s original immigrant grandparents – Friedrich deemed an undesirable in Germany – and Fred Jr, subject of Fred’s abuse that helped drive him into alcoholism and his early spot in the family plot. “From their place in heaven,” intoned Father Frank, “may they shield their son from all harm by their loving protection and give him the strength to guide our nation along the path that will make America great again”.
Fred had been Donald’s protector in Jersey, going so far as to buy the chips at the Trump Castle to try to erase his impecunious son’s debt, which earned Fred a fine from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. The invocation of Fred still hovering as Donald’s protector from heaven canonized the ghost as a saint. But the notion that sainthood runs in the family is an Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition rather than a western Christian one. If Fred is a saint, then his radiance can be transmitted genetically to create a royal lineage, which also has an Eastern Orthodox history. In the Catholic tradition, beginning with Charlemagne, certain kings were designated servants of God on their upward trajectory to beatification.
Thus, the Trump inauguration featured a trinity – the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. God Himself was introduced from the podium by Franklin Graham, the evangelical pastor, who possesses an uncanny intuition of the Almighty’s purposes. “He changes the times and the seasons, he removes kings, he raises up kings,” said Graham. “Our Father”– not Fred this time – “today as President Donald J Trump takes the oath of office once again, we come to say thank you, O Lord our God. When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.” With that, Graham poured the rhetorical oil of divine anointment. “Be a killer, be a king!” Fred Trump had drilled into Donald.
On the frigid inauguration day, through unknowable divine intervention that had forced the swearing-in inside the rotunda of the Capitol, there were arrayed behind Trump on the dais the billionaires of his new oligarchy of what Steve Bannon called “techno-feudalism”, more prominently seated than Trump’s prospective cabinet, while gathered before Trump were the supine Republican leaders, the priestly justices of the supreme court who had granted him the dispensation of delay and “absolute immunity” that enabled him to evade trial for his orchestration of the January 6th insurrection, and his podcasting apostles from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson.
In taking the oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States”, Trump neglected to place his hand on the Bible held for him by Melania. The untouched scripture will be known as the Trump Bible to be available to future presidents who do not wish to touch it. Yet, taking his cue from Franklin Graham, Trump declared: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Crowning himself with divine authority the inauguration became a coronation.
Trump’s second inaugural address was an updating of his first’s theme of “American carnage” as “America’s decline”. He has long proffered versions of the stab in the back myth – the Dolchstoss embraced after World War I to blame the German defeat and the Versailles Treaty on enemies within. Trump’s inaugural address was his latest reiteration. His restoration would overcome the treason. “Our recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place, and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
The “horrible betrayal” that Trump described was a grab-bag of transparent lies, demagogic distractions and contrived irrelevancies. His main accusation, often previously repeated, that foreign countries send “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions” as migrants is patently untrue. His complaint that the Federal Emergency Disaster Agency (Fema) “can no longer deliver basic services” is a flagrant falsehood. His claim that “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves, in many cases to hate our country,” presumably refers to teaching about the history of race in America.
At last, he came to his central lie to expose his principal motivation when he stated, “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life.” The truth was that the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland did not pursue Trump for his crimes leading to January 6th for nearly a year and a half. He could easily have been indicted him for his role in his fake electors scheme and his attempted effort to coerce into his conspiracy his attorney general, William Barr, at a meeting where Barr refused to become complicit in the nakedly criminal plot and was forced to resign. Barr would have been a dispositive witness. Nor was the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania who attempted Trump’s assassination politically motivated against Trump’s “cause,” but a profoundly disturbed young man. But Trump in his inaugural address had to make himself the martyr. His victimology is at the core of his cult of personality.
Trump’s restoration, as he insists, is rooted in his histrionic big lie that he had won the 2020 election and has been mercilessly prosecuted for trying to claim his rightful victory. “Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” he said. “But as you see today, here I am.” His retribution is armed through his projection. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” he said. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the justice department and our government will end.” Or, rather, that imaginary “weaponization” of which he speaks will be reversed and turned on the world within his paranoid mind of enemies within.
During his campaign, time and again, Trump had spoken of the “poison in the blood” from the invasive Other, the migrants “eating the dogs, eating the cats”. The peroration of his inaugural address signaled his obsession with purification and blood. He would, he said, restore “the vitality of history’s greatest civilization” and “liberate our nation”, to “new heights of victory and success” – “it’s the lifeblood of a great nation”. Again, “civilization” is “lifeblood”.
At the congressional luncheon after the inauguration, always in the past a celebration of comity, Trump ranted his old canard that former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the violence on January 6 by not summoning the National Guard: “She’s guilty as hell!” Former Republican representatives on the January 6th committee, drew his ire. Liz Cheney, he said, is “a crying lunatic”, and “crying, crying Adam Kinzinger, he’s a super crier”. His grievance was raw. “2020, by the way, that election was totally rigged.”
If there were any doubts before, Trump’s inauguration provided the clarifying statement of his autocratic intent. After the rituals of democracy, he exalted the trimmings and trappings of Caesarism. In a theatrical spectacle at his indoors parade at the Capital One arena, he sat onstage signing executive orders to begin imposing his regime change.
Many were illegal and some were unconstitutional. By fiat he proclaimed the nullification of birthright citizenship in the 14th amendment. He defied an act of the Congress and a ruling of the supreme court to keep open TikTok, having reversed his position upon receiving the largesse of its part-owner Jeffrey Yass. He impounded congressionally authorized funds for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. He declared a national emergency at the southern border, quiescent with the lowest number of crossings in years, in order to deploy the US military, otherwise prohibited from domestic use under the Posse Comitatus Act.
He announced expungement of the “electric vehicle mandate”, which does not exist and in any case would require the formulation of a rule from the Environmental Protection Agency. All health agencies were forbidden from issuing any information to the public. Trump ludicrously renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, a gesture without international standing. He announced the creation of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has no legal basis as a special commission and has the authority of a podcast. Nonetheless, Trump gave Musk a White House email address, an office in the White House complex and signed another order stating that Musk and others Trump designates are exempt from FBI background checks for six months.
Trump began his inauguration day encircled by a bevy of oligarchs, but ended it giving favor to his mob. In one swoop he issued pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 of his followers convicted of crimes in the January 6 insurrection, more than 600 of whom were convicted of violently assaulting or obstructing police officers. Others included leaders and members of paramilitary groups convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump declared his order “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people”.
His pardons of those he called “hostages” were more than a collective self-pardon. His act was his defiance of the “horrible betrayal” of the 2020 election. It was the culmination of his attempted coup. Now the coup was fulfilled. His insurrection had not been repelled. Its felons were sprung from the jailhouse. The pardons were a free confession of Trump’s own guilt. There could be no more doubt about his state of mind when he incited them to attack the Capitol.
Trump launched his retribution at once. His second term will be a campaign against his enemies within, inhabiting the “Deep State”, who had thwarted him in his first administration. In less than 48 hours, Trump’s great purge had removed hundreds of professional senior officials in the state department, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, and the Department of Justice.
In a Stalin-like gesture, reminiscent of Stalin airbrushing out of photographs Bolshevik politburo members he had purged, executed or assassinated, he ordered the portrait of former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen Mark Milley removed from the Pentagon. Milley had steadily kept the Chinese calm during Trump’s insurrection, for which Trump bellowed Milley deserved “DEATH!” Trump then purged the first woman admiral who commanded the Coast Guard. It was the beginning of Trump’s coming purge of the top ranks of the officer corps that he eagerly anticipates his secretary of defense, the far-right extremist Pete Hegseth, to carry out.
Trump’s big day of return ended at the Capital One arena with Elon Musk taking the stage. “My heart goes out you,” he said. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” With that, he aggressively thrust out his arm in a Hitler salute–the Hitlergruss.
Musk has lately backed the German far-right nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party, tinged with neo-Nazi figures and Holocaust denial, and crusaded against the prison sentence of a neo-Nazi sentenced for violent actions in racist riots in England incited by disinformation on Musk’s X site.
Musk attempted to deflect criticism of his Hitler salute by posting that the Democrats have become “the party of division & hate … Now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.” He added: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute” ran the headline in an editorial comment in the German newspaper Die Zeit. “You don’t have to make this unnecessarily complicated at the beginning. Anyone who stretches his right arm on a political stage during a political speech in front of a partly extreme right-wing audience and several times obliquely up, makes the Hitler salute. There’s no need for ‘allegedly’ or ‘reminiscent of’ or controversial.’”
Unmistakably, Musk’s gesture at the Trump gala was the Hitler salute, but to make it more authentic to the occasion he should have shouted to the crowd and to Trump the line of the fey Hitler from Mel Brooks’ The Producers: “Heil myself!”
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
