“The golden age of America begins right now,” Donald Trump said Monday at the start of his second inaugural speech. “Our golden age has just begun,” he said at its end. Actually, what Trump intends to usher in is, as my TNR colleague Matt Ford noted this morning, a second Gilded Age—an epoch of political corruption. Trump (or his speechwriter) wants you to believe he’s the second coming of Pericles, who presided over the golden age of Athens. In truth, Trump is the second coming of Trump.
It’s kind of a strange resurrection story. Trump was finished off, or so we thought, by a New York jury that found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to a porn actress whom he bedded four months after his wife Melania bore him their only child. Trump’s second inaugural speech celebrates the 45th president’s resurrection after his felony conviction as the 47th president. Are Trump’s sins washed clean? Not exactly. Trump spent this past weekend shredding what’s left of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by peddling a meme-coin cryptocurrency called, unironically, $TRUMP and valued, as I write this, at somewhere around $10 billion.
The phrase “golden age,” in a political context, conjures the flowering of democracy, philosophy, literature, and art in ancient Athens. But Trump himself just likes the color gold. Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower are lousy with gilt. It’s a fitting decorative obsession for our new Gilded Age, a phrase coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 novel of the same name. The novel is about the buying and selling of government officials in Washington, D.C., during a moment in history (1870-1900) that remains, even at this late date, the single most corrupt period in American political history. Ironically, the corruption was not generated by what Trump today calls “the swamp,” i.e., the civil service, which didn’t even exist until the 1880s. It was generated by Congress and by the same political cronyism that Trump is trying to, well, resurrect.
“The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” said the president. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.” That’s not what Kash Patel says, but never mind. Trump’s point is that his crucifixion was also the country’s. “My recent election,” Trump said, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place.” Two paragraphs later, Trump shifted more explicitly to the Passion of the Trump. “Over the past eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history,” he said. But instead of bitching about his felony rap, Trump invoked his assassination attempt, thereby conflating in listeners’ minds his entirely justified prosecution with a madman’s evil attempt to kill him. “Just a few months ago.” Trump said, “in that beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” This delusional and borderline blasphemous statement brought him a standing ovation in the Capitol Rotunda.
Trump described various imaginary crises in his speech. He said he’s declaring “a national emergency at our southern border,” which, as The New York Times notes, has been fairly quiet since now-former President Joe Biden effectively halted asylum claims in June. Trump said he’s directing his cabinet “to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.” The inflation spike ended nearly three years ago, inflation is currently below 3 percent, and (incidentally) any economy where “costs and prices” come down across the board is by definition a failing one.
Trump’s vision of a resurrected country entails the rebirth of the American imperium, but Trump’s jingoism is starting to look like a bluff. Trump said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and (to honor his favorite president) he would restore William McKinley’s name to Mount Denali. These proposed actions are stupid but they don’t threaten any foreign nation. On Panama, Trump said “we’re taking it back,” but he didn’t elaborate, and probably he means we’ll try to negotiate lower prices for traversing the canal. The “American ships” that Trump said “are being overcharged” may very well be overcharged but they aren’t American ships; they’re foreign ships that deliver goods to United States ports. Reviving the United States merchant marine isn’t a bad idea, but Trump’s strategy of pretending we still have one won’t get us very far. Most notably, the speech contained no mention of annexing Canada or Greenland.
We still don’t really know what the Second Coming of Donald Trump will bring. Trump, as I’ve observed before, was a weak president the first time and will likely be weaker the second. But that doesn’t make him less dangerous; it just means his more out-of-control underlings (especially Stephen Miller) will be given a freer hand. That Trump’s political career rose from the dead is some kind of miracle; I’ll give Trump that. But it’s also proof that not every miracle is something to celebrate.
