One of the marvels in the Washington museums is the buckskin jacket once worn by George A Custer. It is there, behind glass, as one of the curios explaining the United States’s relentless and bloodthirsty westward expansion. It always draws a crowd. But this week, the museums were closed on Monday because of the presidential inauguration and quiet all week because of the cold.
The Golden Age has started out in extremes. In Los Angeles, new fires broke out across the canyons while in Washington DC the footpaths remained under a hard freeze. It has been Donald Trump’s week of fire and ice in the United States and there is no sign of a return to dull, reliable routine.
One of the reasons many Americans like to feel secure in their sense that the government is working for them is that they can then ignore the dreary debates and back-stabbing and politicking on Capitol Hill and get on with their chief obligations and privileges: the pursuit of happiness, watching football, working long hours, raising families and enjoying exorbitantly expensive college years.
Who has time to follow the debates on C-Span or sit through the interminable hours in the House of Representatives, apart from political boffins and what President Trump has rebranded “the fake news” media? January is peak football season. In Washington – in another signal that Trump has for 78 years walked under a lucky star – the perennially losing football team, the Commanders, are enjoying a season for the ages. That’s no small thing in a political city that can struggle for an identity beyond the imperious monuments and the most famous house address in the United States. But even the Commanders’ thrilling run has been eclipsed by the return to the White House of Trump.
Where do you even begin?
On Wednesday, Trump invited his old pal Sean Hannity into the Oval Office for the first sit-down exclusive. It was broadcast on Fox, which is in Excelsis mode now. Trump was in reflective mode; admiring the office, Hannity noted that the executive desk was the same piece of furniture that JFK had sat at. “Yes,” Trump said pointing to the sliding door and adding, “that’s where John-John played” – a throwback reference to the Camelot era.
At one stage, as Trump threatened to go down a rabbit hole of grievance against Joe Biden, Hannity gently reminded him that they needed to talk about “the economy”.
“I don’t care,” Trump snapped, flashing a grin. It was an aside. But it is one of those clips that will become emblematic if US inflation is not corrected as has been promised. Above everything, that is what the majority of his voters want to see change.
One of the first pieces of legislation passed in Trump’s second term was the Laken Riley Bill, which sailed through the Senate and came before the House on Thursday. The immigration detention act is named after a Georgia nursing student whose horrific murder, while she was out for a morning run on campus, became an election campaign touchstone. An undocumented immigrant was convicted of the crime. During Biden’s state of the union speech in the House last March, Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly heckled him with calls of “say her name”.
Now, in the same chamber, Democrat Jamie Raskin voiced, in his opening remarks, the critique of his party over the opening days of the Trump administration.
“We have all these fine speeches and all these fancy parties with billionaires and Congressmen in tuxedos; all these executive orders for Big Oil and the tech broligarchs; all these complete and unconditional pardons for Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and violent extremists who chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence’ and smashed, swarmed and wounded our police officers in this building with steel polls, baseball bats, American flags, Confederate battle flags and bear mace – all this sound and fury on day one and week one. But nothing to bring down grocery prices; nothing to bring down the cost of rent as they promised.
“Nothing to improve our healthcare system or build on our success in the last Congress in reducing prescription drug prices; nothing to get health insurance coverage for millions of people who don’t have it. Nothing to bring down the cost of housing or build new housing; nothing to combat the nightmare of climate change other than the full-scale retreat of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord; nothing to address the real problems faced by the American people.
”Today they want to change the subject from the indelible and shocking public safety disaster of the president releasing hundreds of convicted felons; specifically violent cop-beating felons caught on tape in the act, whom he had incited on January 6th, 2021, back into the population with no plan for protecting the American people or the public safety.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Congresswoman, and a staunch advocate of immigrant rights, laid out the implications of the Bill in stark terms.
“In the guise and the wake of tragedy we are seeing a fundamental erosion of civil rights in this Bill,” she said.
“If a person is so much as accused of a crime or if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court, without a moment to assert their rights, and without a moment to assert the privilege of innocence until proven guilty ...
“Look no further than the $83 billion price tag of this Bill. They know that it can’t be paid for. They know that the capacity is not there. Do you know what will be there? Private prison companies are going to get.flooded with money ... I want folks at home to look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies ...”.
And it is true that private prison companies are preparing for a bonanza. Shares in such companies have rocketed since the November election – GeoGroup up 127 per cent, CoreCivic up 63 per cent. The Bill passed by 263 votes to 156, with the support of 46 Democrats.
But the verbal fireworks of Congress have been relegated to a sideshow. The Republican lawmakers are well versed and have the numbers. The Democrats are outraged and fired up, but powerless. For much of the week, the main spotlight of media attention was focused on Trump as he sat in the redecorated Oval Office, merrily putting his John Hancock to the blizzard of executive orders loyal to the manifesto of the Make America Great Again movement.
The sweeping changes attracted heavy analysis and worldwide attention: the pardons to the January 6th Capitol rioters; the immigration order that would end birthright citizenship; a first national energy emergency declaration; the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organisation; the dispatch of 1,500 troops to the southern border; the immediate suspension (with paid leave) of federal officials working on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes; the recognition of only two genders (male/female) by the federal government. Then came the sidebar eccentricities: the Gulf of America. The acquisition of Greenland and the Panama Canal. The DOGE project. The Donald and Melania meme coins. The announcement, by three new tech billionaires, of the $500 billion Stargate project in the White House – which was trashed hours later on social media by a slighted Elon Musk.
As politics go, the first week was a laser show generating Democratic disbelief and Republican rapture, unease and amusement across the world. Tariff threats and aggressive tax measures bother Ireland. But immediate anguish is the outcome for those most afflicted by the sweep of the pen in the Oval Office.
“They are losing hope,” said Franking Frias, deputy director of the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières for Mexico and Central America, from his office in Mexico City when we spoke on Thursday of the migrants gathering close to the southern US border crossing points.
“They are really stressed, anxious,” he said. “There are people in need of mental health support that we are giving to them. Many of them: they are in crisis. Many of them already had appointments [with US border officials] in the coming days and weeks. These people have been travelling, some of them for years, or months. On the way, they lose everything. Some have already been kidnapped, assaulted, and suffered robberies. They have almost nothing and the only hope they had was this appointment to move to the United States and suddenly it is not there. Some people don’t know what to do. Some are moving to the centres because it is very cold. Some are thinking just to go back to their countries.”
[ Why is Donald Trump glaring in his inauguration portrait?Opens in new window ]
The U-turn towards origin countries is, of course, the precise objective of the Trump immigration policies. Images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams making raids and arrests on immigrants identified as criminals in wintry Boston would have reached those migrants on Thursday.
Frias says that although the fear would deter some people, it would propel others to more desperate measures. Some were “considering another means to get across the border – which means smugglers. And paying more money, which many of them don’t have. Now that the legal mechanism is no longer available they will try other ways, even if it is dangerous for them. And for some they want to be united with families who are already on the other side”.
But none of that is felt in Washington. Trump maintains such an unusual public persona – blithe, comedic, profane, aggressive – that it is sometimes difficult to guess at what he thinks or feels about the extraordinariness of his own life. That was never more apparent than in the days after the attempt to assassinate him at a rally in Pennsylvania in July.The speculation was that the Trump, who appeared at the Republican convention in Milwaukee just two days later, would be profoundly – and understandably – altered. He did seem more subdued but no more so than if he was getting over a bad cold. By his Thursday night speech, he was back to form.
But his inauguration speech in the Rotunda on Monday contained intimations of what he truly feels about that experience. The speech was not a memorable address, in part because Trump was forced to read a script, which he dislikes and which he believes is as pointless as having Jimi Hendrix limiting himself to playing sheet music.
“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness,” he said at one stage. In a separate interview, he agreed that his brush with violent death had deepened his spirituality.
Trump has clearly been adrenalised by his phenomenal acquisition of power – the presidency, the magic thrust of those executive order pens, the fawning tech billionaires in his court, the popular vote. But he must be, at 78, aware that time is limited and if you clear away the detritus and sporadic energy of his first few days, you are left with the blueprint of his drive for a legacy. He wants to be the president who brokers a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. He wants to be in office if and when Musk renewsthe US’s interplanetary ambitions.
He wants to stake his claim over the next two years. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars,” he said, an odd concoction of the phrase that contains echoes of Custer’s ill-fated date in Montana, JFK’s aspirations for the limitless 1960s –”We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard” – and Musk’s ambition to plant a US flag on Mars.
The most incredible moment of the week came in the last minutes or seconds of the Biden administration, right when Trump stood before the dais, ready to be sworn in. Even as his successor recited the oath, the last vestiges of Joe Biden’s power dissolved and automatically transferred to #47. The solemnity, the bewigged statues, the 250 years, and the absolute respect for the office of president meant that everyone, even the liberal networks, bought into the pageantry of the moment.
Inauguration Day is the sacred day in the United States. So, everyone tried to ignore the sheer strangeness and the uneasy questions hanging over the potent image of the three richest men on Earth in the frame behind Trump. If you looked closely at Robert F Kennedy, the future health secretary and 71-year-old blood descendant of Democratic royalty, you could all but read the questions rolling across the pale eyes. What is going on here? What am I doing here?
The peculiar thing was the most mature person of those watching the new president on the dais was Barron Trump, his imposingly tall 18-year-old son, who has acquired a cult persona by seldom speaking in public and revealing little emotion. The youngest Trump was alone up there in not needing to try to catch a favourable glance or gesture from the new president – note the twinkly, hopeful little wave Jeff Bezos directed at Trump from the crowd. Unlike Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or any of them, Barron is secure in the knowledge that he will always be Trump’s son – and possibly his preferred political heir. He was alone among the Trumps and the billionaires in taking the few steps across the aisle to extend the courtesy of shaking hands with Biden and Kamala Harris when the ceremony had concluded.
Can Trump keep this pace up? And how long before the people begin to tire of his holding the black executive orders before the camera, like some old style television magician about to perform another trick to stupefy and thrill the masses? Trump has an uncanny instinct for presaging and manipulating the international news agenda and the social media torrents so he knows attentions spans are limited.
Right now, Trump has the goodwill and patience of his electorate to burn. Everything he invoked this week is a symbol of his promise to transport his believers back to a better place – back to the golden land of a once great America. And although it is seldom mentioned, part of the appeal of that place must be that it is the promise of a pre-Covid time. The sharper memories of the boredom and bleakness (and 1.2 million American deaths) are fading but the pandemic has had a lasting impact on the rhythms of life here.
Europeans like to mock and stereotype Americans for being “loud”. It seems as though this is a quieter country now. Less conversation. The studies on the sweeping epidemic of loneliness and more isolated lives – the inevitable outcome of the toys and apps bequeathed on society by the tech masters of the universe – are yielding troubling results.
Add that to the decline in optimism and the fact that millions of the younger generation believe themselves priced out of their shot at the American dream and you get the sense that patience will be finite. Eventually, the prices must come down. Sooner or later, the economists’ warning about tariffs (higher prices for consumers) will be put to the litmus test. Sooner or later, Trump will have to confront Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, the ideological battle lines have been drawn. The media battalions are back at the front lines, airing their views and their lavishly paid anchors. In short, the first five days of Trump II were predictable in the sense of havoc and dramatic upheaval but nonetheless staggering in scale. On Friday, the president was scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, to inspect the dreamlands ravaged by fires. His energy right now seems limitless.
On Thursday afternoon, he was still signing executive orders, live on television, including his promise to release the long held classified files containing information about the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King jnr.
“And everything will be revealed,” he promised as he signed his name.
Then #47 paused for a moment after he signed the order and looked thoughtfully around the Oval Office before handing the pen to his aide.
“Give that to RFK jnr,” he instructed.
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