Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 21/strong>
Wiser about the use of power, the newly sworn-in president suggests that this time he will not take no for an
answer, whether in enacting an ambitious domestic agenda or in his expansionist worldview.
answer, whether in enacting an ambitious domestic agenda or in his expansionist worldview.
by David E. Sanger
New York Times: “Nothing will stand in our way.” With that six-word vow, President Trump described how he planned to make his second term in office differ from his first. Now, after a four-year interregnum that began with political exile and ended with his improbable resurrection, the great disrupter made clear that he does not intend to be thwarted this time in making America far more conservative at home and more imperial abroad.
In his 29-minute inaugural address, Mr. Trump wasted no time on lofty appeals to American ideals. Instead, he spoke with a tone of aggression intended to be heard by domestic and foreign audiences as a warning that America under a more experienced Donald Trump will not take no for an answer. He will end an era in which the world exploited American generosity, he said, empowering an “External Revenue Service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
After falsely declaring that China controls the American-built Panama Canal, he vowed, “We’re taking it back.” He hailed a presidential predecessor: not Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, but William McKinley, the tariff-loving 25th president, who engaged in the Spanish-American War, seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico and paved the way for that canal.
And in the best McKinley spirit, he reinvigorated the idea of an America that will “pursue our manifest destiny,” a rallying call of the 1890s. This time, though, he described that destiny as an American settlement on Mars — a declaration that brought a thumbs up from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who founded SpaceX with that goal in mind, and who has barely left the president’s side since Election Day.
Mr. Trump’s burst of executive orders were intended to send the message that this time the chaotic disruption that marked his first term would be married to rapid and more disciplined execution.
He began essentially shutting down the southern border to migrants and signaled his intention to challenge the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.
He was scrapping restrictions on drilling and exporting oil and gas and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord again. Even with parts of Los Angeles still burning, there was no talk of climate change.
Federal funding of gender transition care was out. Federal forms, his aides told reporters, would be set back to a previous era, and allow people to check only “male” or “female.”
To anyone who watched Mr. Trump struggle through his first term, this combination of the substantive and the performative, with the gestures to his base, seemed familiar. The big difference, his aides suggest, is that this time he knows how to get it done, substantively as well as symbolically.
He sent signals intended as warnings to what he has long regarded as a “deep-state” opposition to his agenda. Within hours of his swearing-in, the Pentagon portrait of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was taken off the wall outside his former office. It was General Milley, of course, who stood up to Mr. Trump, pushing back on using the military to put down Black Lives Matter protests and reminding his troops that they take an oath to the Constitution and not to a “wannabe dictator,” as he put it so vividly at his retirement ceremony (General Milley was given a pre-emptive pardon by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday morning).
It was a reminder to all those who remain in the building — and at the State Department, the Justice Department or the intelligence agencies, among others — that the rules had changed. At the State Department and the F.B.I. key career officials turned in their passes over the past few days, rather than wait to be fired.
And gone, almost completely, are the establishment figures whom Mr. Trump turned to eight years ago for his cabinet because he thought they lent legitimacy and an air of competence to his new presidency. Instead, he has showcased his reliance on outsiders like Mr. Musk and his choices to lead the Pentagon and the F.B.I., Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, both of whom have pledged to fundamentally revamp those institutions.
