From the sublime to the ridiculous, Trump casts himself as a man of destiny in fiery inaugural speech

PRESIDENT Donald Trump. That very title is jarring for those who remember the attempted insurrection on Jan 6, 2021, in Washington, but the most controversial leader in modern American history is now back in power and feeling quite messianic.

Seeing the 78-year-old inaugurated as the 47th US president on Monday (Jan 20) in the very same Capitol rotunda where that infamous riot took place was surreal, and so was much of his speech. 

There was the sublime. Even Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, who only stood to applaud once (for the released Israeli hostages), would have to credit some of Trump’s moments of effective rhetoric. “Impossible is what Americans do best” is a line that would have featured in a typical Barack Obama speech.

There was the dark, with constant upbraiding of immigrants as nefarious invaders.

And then there was the ridiculous. Trump vowed to reclaim the Panama Canal, inaccurately alleging that China operates the waterway, and that Panama had somehow welched on a half-century-old deal. He said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. 

At one stage, Tesla founder Elon Musk looked at the cameras with a goofy smile and two thumbs up while Trump promised to plant the US flag on Mars. The “First Buddy”, as some have described Musk, might have been cheering on Trump as his friend riffed on one of those outlandish theories that fraternity brothers hatch in the wee hours of the night.

Another head-scratcher was Trump’s unveiling of the External Revenue Service, a new agency that would collect tariffs and other revenues from foreign countries. It’s unclear, though, how this would differ from the Treasury Department’s existing methods of tariff collection.

Throughout his inaugural address, Trump cast himself as a man of destiny, claiming that God saved him from an assassin’s bullet at an outdoor rally in Pennsylvania last July to make a nation in decline “great again”.

He sounded like a man who’s been out of power for decades, rather than one whose presidency had ended in shambolic fashion just four years ago.

Executive orders

Trump has been making promises about signing dozens of executive orders on his first day back in office since the start of his underdog campaign for re-election, vowing to push on all fronts from the word “go”.

During the speech, however, he seemed to capitulate to the bond-and-stock investors who have shrunk from his tariff plans. Trump did not specify any specific tariff plans, and has reportedly opened back-channel negotiations with China on trade. US stock futures surged on Monday afternoon (Tuesday morning, Singapore time) amid hopes that all the tariff talk had been a negotiating position after all.

Tariffs are sure to come at some point, however. Trump embraced former US president William McKinley as his spirit predecessor, a historical interest that developed due to the fact that McKinley defended US steelmaking and iron-ore with tariffs during a long political career in the late 19th century.

Trump even said he would change the name of Mount Denali in Alaska, the highest US mountain, back to Mount McKinley. It was a thumb in the eye for those who have tried to acknowledge native Americans and other minorities in identity politics. But it was also a symbolic embrace of tariffs.

Tough on migrants

Tariffs on trading partners, clemency for the Jan 6 rioters, and a mass deportation of migrants had all seemed to be equal priorities on the campaign trail. In Trump’s speech, the migrants were promised the first taste of the new president’s wrath. He repeated inflammatory and spurious claims that the US had been “invaded” by “millions and millions” of criminal migrants.

By using the “invasion” metaphor – a controversial one used to racist ends in 20th-century Europe – Trump cast migration reform as a military problem. He is expected to declare national emergencies on several fronts as an end-run around the conventional legislative approach to changing migration laws.

Under a health emergency, he will seal the Mexican border. Under a border emergency, he will designate drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, increase deportations and move troops to the border, The New York Times reported.

Trump will also declare an energy emergency, in order to open up drilling on more federal lands.

The people of Greenland and Denmark may also be breathing a sigh of relief. While Trump made a general comment about expanding US territory, his only specific threat was to Panama, a country of 4.4 million, rather than the Danish affiliated Greenland, which – though more than 25 times the size of Panama – has a population of only 56,000.

This time around, Trump seemed to indicate, he knew how the levers of power worked much better than when he was a White House novice back in 2017.

It was an argument that was somewhat undermined immediately after his speech ended, as pop star Carrie Underwood took to the stage to sing America the Beautiful.

The performance did not go as planned. A technical malfunction cut off her backing music as she was about to begin, forcing her to sing a capella.

Just as how she had to quickly improvise and get the job done, this could well be a foreshadowing of sorts of what the next four years in a Trump White House could be like.