Trump Unbound

WHEN POWER IS wielded by the most unapologetic politician, it threatens a few, sends some into a paroxysm of the-end-is-here, and even provokes the defeated to condemn democracy. Mostly, it opens a world where the winner alone dares—to take the victory to the last frontiers of the nation that indulges him. On a wintry noon in Washington, power shed caution as Donald Trump took oath—for the second time in eight years—as the president of the United States, and his inauguration speech, delivered without the lofty rhetoric the occasion demanded but with the terrifying clarity of specifics, provided it with a manifesto rich in messianism. There he was, with that beatific visage of the one risen from the ruins of his pride, playing the parts of revolutionary and redeemer, protector and punisher, with the flamboyance of someone who earned his right the hardest way to get a place in the history of power. The American Dream was recast, for better or for worse.

INDIVIDUAL EXCEPTIONALISM There’s nothing more to be said about American exceptionalism, maintained for so long by the moral equilibrium between power and freedom, which no other nation could achieve despite the benefits of geography or democracy, no matter it was occasionally subverted by leadership traits. Trump invoked God to italicise his inevitability as America’s “liberator” after a series of “betrayals”. He survived the assassin’s bullet by the intervention of God, implying, in his own presidential words, he was as chosen as Moses to show the way. On January 20, Trump mythologised his own power by turning Capitol Hill into his private Mount Sinai.

IMPERIALISM REDUX The shrinking of the American Dream has been a leitmotif in the lamentations of orphaned conservatives and the jubilations of progressives for quite some time. Ronald Reagan had a Berlin Wall as the right backdrop to play the tear-it-down cowboy during the Cold War; George W Bush saw, after the melting down of the twin towers, the post-communist axis of evil in the craggy mountains of Afghanistan. Still, the neocons’ transborder romance came to an end in the chaos of Saddam-less Iraq. Trump has the aftermath of one war and the weariness of another to test America’s power. But it was all about expansionism as a nationalist responsibility when he waded into the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico. Greenland would follow. Promising the American flag on Mars, the imperialism of Trump’s America intends to seek intergalactic validation, with Elon Musk as cheerleader.

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS ONLY Immigration is one issue that Western liberals want to avoid, knowing they cannot win the argument beyond the echo chambers—out there among the voters. Brexit was the first instance of the folly of dismissing those who feel more at home waking up every morning to familiar sounds and faces as natives stranded in nostalgia. By declaring a national emergency on the border to end the “alien” threat to America’s resources and its citizens’ safety, Trump has made immigration a nationalist’s first concern. As politics defies the straitjackets of left and right, the winners are those who deify the nation. They are brazen about guarding “national character”, which in the case of America has always been interpreted as the most generous. Trump has de-romanticised it, replacing the image of the dream-chaser reaching the land of opportunity with that of the “dreamer” eating the natives’ pets. On Inauguration Day, Trump began the work on a monument to his own patriotism: the Great Wall of America.

MACHO CONSERVATISM One phrase that resonated as very Conservative in his Inauguration speech was “a revolution of common sense”. For once it sounded very much in tune with a political concept that, in the words of the much-quoted Michael Oakeshott, prefers “the familiar to the unknown… the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Despite Trump’s recourse to the big word, conservatism is less revolutionary and more evolutionary. Trump deployed “common sense revolution” at a time when national conservatives have already brought Burke back to the conversation. And they all make the pilgrimage to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest to be blessed by the patron saint, though, temperamentally, Trump is closer to an anarcho-capitalist like Javier Milei, the new Argentinean president who was a prominent guest at the Inauguration. With Trump, conservatism is suddenly shedding its quiet ideological confidence and flexing its muscles and spouting statements to match. As the chosen slayer of liberal norms, he has given an aggressive urgency to American conservatism, a huge cultural shift on the Right after Reagan. If Trumpism is a movement, its ideological foundation is made of conservatism pumped up by the MAGA spirit.

It was not America’s golden era that began on January 20, as the new president claimed. It was the hyperbole of the redeemer cult with a golden patina.

AmericaCapitol HillDonald Trump Inauguration ceremonygeopoliticsideologyUS politics