PRESIDENT TRUMP GIVES VOTERS JUST WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
Donald Trump is once again President – and his second administration promises to be more Trumpian than ever.
Sworn in just after noon yesterday (1/20) – both the inauguration ceremony and his stick-swinging inauguration speech shielded from the cold inside the Capitol Building – he is essentially picking up where he left off. This time, however, Trump & Co have far more experience of how to navigate Washington’s corridors of power. They’re already showing it.
The past few weeks have seen Trump’s transition team prove its deftness in everything from foreign policy – that Gaza ceasefire – to a domestic agenda rife with executive orders promising to dismantle the vast DEI and identity politics network that former president Joe Biden and the Democrats had assembled with such alacrity.
And as Trump’s second inauguration speech made clear, he is only just getting started.
Eight years ago, Trump raised eyebrows – and ire – with his now infamous inauguration warning about the “American carnage” he believed had overtaken the nation. It “stops right here, right now,” he said, “from this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.”
Today’s speech was filled with a similar sense of intent, only wrapped in a more sanguine bow. “The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump said. “From this day forward, our country will flourish.”
So what does it mean for America to “flourish” during Trump 2.0?
As he detailed on the campaign trail, immigration will be Trump’s most immediate priority, necessitating a series of rapid-response executive orders – and potential troop deployments – along the US-Mexico border to deport “criminal aliens” and halt the “emergency at our Southern border”.
He framed his migrant policy as one of “common sense,” which drove the crowd wild as he went on to exclaim “all illegal entry will immediately be halted”, while Mexican drug cartels will soon be considered “foreign terrorists”.
But his plans for immigration were just the beginning. At times, Trump’s address read like a laundry-list of the policy promises he has provocatively touted since his November election victory. There was the Panama Canal, which Trump said the US is “taking back” – both, it seems, from the Panamanian government as well as their alleged patrons in Beijing.
DEI is also on Trump’s radar, most notably gender ideology. “As of today … there are only two genders,” he declared under the Capitol’s rotunda.
Trump also attacked the state of America’s public health system as one “that does not deliver”, and the nation’s education system as teaching children to “hate” their country. Under Biden, America “has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders,” Trump added.
This will now change, ending “America’s decline” and ushering in a new “golden age” that he believes began the moment he took the oath of office.
The speech was classic Trump, strident, aggressive, and macho. But it was the content that counted more than the style – for the President delivered exactly what his supporters wanted (and expected) to hear.
That’s true for the minority voters who turned out in record numbers for Trump on election day and for whom inauguration day holds extra importance arriving, as it has, on the Martin Luther King, Jr holiday.
Invoking the language of King himself – and his quest for African-American equality – Trump branded January 20 as “Liberation Day” and committed to making Dr King’s dreams come true. After all, Trump’s going to war on Critical Race Theory and the DEI industry is fully consistent with King’s dream of a color-blind society.
With Joe Biden now on a helicopter and headed for a long-overdue retirement, America is a nation fundamentally and forever changed.
The progressive agenda launched by Obama and most fully-realized under Biden has been proven both ineffective and massively unpopular. America wants a return to the basics – lower costs, safer streets, conventional cultural norms, and a semblance of racial harmony.
Trump believes he can deliver it. That’s exactly what the voters want him to do.
David Christopher Kaufman is an African-American journalist who writes for several major publications such as the Financial Times and the New York Post.