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Sunday, 26 January 2025
Reward and retribution: Week one of Trump 2.0 told us a lot about what's likely to come.
Donald Trump's presidential style is familiar, but his second term looks different in several key ways. (Reuters: Leah Millis)
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The deep divisions over the man who has taken back the White House were on stark display in the US capital this week.
Washington DC was at once a party and a ghost town.
It was filled with happy supporters of the new president, many of them tourists, kitted out in Trump beanies and MAGA caps.
Despite the bitter cold, they joyfully celebrated the second coming of the man who claims his victory was God-given.
"I
was saved by God to make America great again," the incoming president
said in his inauguration address, a reference to his brush with death on
a field in Butler, Pennsylvania in July last year.
Yet
there was also a quiet in Washington's streets, the noticeable absence
of many of the city's predominantly Democratic residents.
As
Trump 2.0 arrived with fireworks, a circus-like show in a downtown
arena and a blizzard of executive orders, many locals stayed home.
As if back in COVID times they hunkered down, licking their wounds and wondering how to get through the next four years.
"I'm
not going to catastrophise this time around," one man told me of his
coping strategy, not sounding too convinced he'd pull it off.
Shock, awe and a reality check
It was an inauguration address like no other.
After
announcing the advent of America's "golden age", Donald Trump proceeded
to trash his predecessor who was sitting just metres away from him.
Joe
Biden, he suggested, was part of "a radical and corrupt establishment"
that had "extracted power and wealth from our citizens".
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could only watch as Donald Trump vowed to trash their legacy. (Shawn Thew/Pool via Reuters)
Trump
said he'd declare a national emergency at the southern border and a
national energy emergency, end government diversity and equity programs
and decree that there were only two genders.
The
former reality TV star then headed downtown, where he made a show of
signing the first of his executive orders at a fake Oval Office desk in
an arena filled with his supporters.
Later,
at the White House, he signed more orders as he made off-the-cuff
comments to reporters gathered in the actual Oval Office.
Within hours, the "J6 hostages," as MAGA world calls them, would start to walk free.
By
that point, America's 47th president was making the rounds of the
traditional inauguration balls, dancing with his wife Melania, and
later, noticeably more enthusiastically, with a sword.
Did the man have no off button?
As his team had promised, it was in many ways a day of shock and awe.
And yet when you scratched a little deeper there was a familiar gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
Trump
signed more executive orders on his first day in office than any other
president, but the total — 26 — was nowhere near the 100 or even 200
that had been foreshadowed.
A
court in Washington state has placed a temporary stay on the move to
end the automatic right to US citizenship for anyone born here,
regardless of their parents' legal status.
Four
Democratic-led states brought the action, one of multiple lawsuits
backed by 22 states, who argue the move is unconstitutional.
Donald Trump began signing executive orders at an indoor presidential inauguration parade event on Tuesday. (AP: Evan Vucci)
The
president knows some of these orders will become caught up in legal
battles, but in the short-term that doesn't really matter.
He's thrown his supporters some red meat, and he'll relish the fight.
Reward and retribution
It was the morning after his swearing in and Trump was sitting on a church pew looking decidedly uncomfortable.
He
appeared to be struggling to stay awake during the multi-faith prayer
service at the National Cathedral, held to cap off inauguration events.
Then
a bishop shook things up, issuing a direct plea to the president to
show mercy to people she said might feel scared as a result of his
executive orders, including the LGBTQ community and illegal immigrants.
"The
people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labour in
poultry farms and meat-packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat
in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals.
"They
may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast
majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good
neighbours," Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde told the congregation.
Trump and his allies were quick to lash out, the president calling Bishop Budde "nasty in tone" and "not very good at her job".
One Republican congressman suggested the Bishop be "added to the deportation list".
The bishop took the chance to make a plea to the president.
Parallel versions of the spat played out during Trump's first days back in the White House.
Those who have been loyal to him have been rewarded.
They
include the people who, fired up by his false claims of a stolen
election, stormed the Capitol in January 2021, some of them violently
assaulting police officers and calling for the vice-president to be
hanged.
On the flip side, his perceived enemies have been denigrated and punished.
Trump
has moved quickly to strip security protections from a number of former
high-ranking officials with whom he has had public disputes.
On
the list are former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, former
secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and former national security adviser
John Bolton.
All have previously received death threats, the latter two from Iran.
The new president is however already faltering on several key pledges.
He
hasn't ended the Ukraine war in a day, he hasn't yet imposed tariffs on
China, Canada and Mexico, and the deportation raids his team flagged
have, at time of writing, not yet eventuated at scale.
That's not to say that Trump's brave new world is not emerging.
Refugees cleared to come to the US have had their flights cancelled.
Undocumented migrants, and there are millions of them living and working in the US, must now live in fear of deportation.
An app used by migrants still in Mexico to book appointments to seek asylum in the US has been shut down.
Government
employees are being encouraged to dob in anyone continuing to work on
programs aimed at promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and
accessibility in the workplace.
The new president is also threatening to take a wrecking ball to the agency that responds to natural disasters, FEMA.
All this as the tech billionaires who once censored him now vie for his attention.
In
a striking image of this about face, the world's three richest men had
seats in the VIP section at the inauguration — Tesla CEO and now close
confidante Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
CEOs
and billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and
Elon Musk were front and centre at the US Capitol as Donald Trump was
inaugurated. (AP:Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
'Here I am'
"Many
people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic
political comeback," Trump said in his inauguration address.
"But as you see today, here I am."
The
decisiveness of Trump's win doesn't change the fact that he, like all
presidents before him, doesn't have long to enact his plans.
By next year, the midterm election races will be heating up.
If
the president hasn't delivered on his promises on the economy or
foreign wars, or if his campaign against illegal migrants has backfired,
he could find that Republican members of Congress looking to hold onto
their seats are more willing to defy him.
Republicans now control the House and Senate but could lose their grip on one or both in the November 2026 elections, making it a lot more difficult to pass legislation.
The
bromance with Musk, owner of X, could also be tested over the coming
days and weeks, with signs of tension already surfacing.
For now, this is Trump and the MAGA movement's moment.
It'd be easy to say we'd seen it all before.
There is some truth in that, but Trump 2.0 is like Trump on steroids.
He's bolder, more organised, surrounded by a fiercely loyal team and, as yet, largely unchecked.
Trump's first term now seems like just the warm-up act.
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