Feeding Time at the Trough

The​ speeches American presidents deliver on the day of their inauguration don’t make much of a difference to anything. A handful have given resonant phrases to the language (‘The better angels of our nature’, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’) but most are soon folded away and mothballed along with the event as a whole. Like the coronation oaths of medieval kings, these are occasions to pay lip service to the pieties before the serious business of governing begins, at which point the words tend to be forgotten. The only inaugural address with claims to have decisively shaped what followed came in 1841 when William Henry Harrison – ‘Old Tippecanoe’ – was so keen to show he was capable of observing the proprieties that he delivered a two-hour disquisition on constitutional government without a coat or hat in the cold and wet Washington winter. He caught a chill and within a month was dead from what was widely assumed to be pneumonia, though given the state of the White House plumbing at the time it is just as likely to have been typhoid.

While it’s not possible to predict much about a presidential administration from what’s said at the very beginning, these speeches do provide a good lens through which to look back at the preoccupations of the age. Harrison’s speech was mainly concerned with the perils of concentrating power in any one branch of government, particularly the executive. He was at pains to point out that he would not make a despotism of the presidency, something he thought would happen if anyone served more than four years in that office. So he made a public pledge that ‘under no circumstances will I consent to serve a second term,’ a promise he was able in his way to keep. Most of his immediate successors followed suit as one-term presidents, with only the Civil War leaders Lincoln and Grant – true despots in the eyes of their opponents – securing re-election. In 1893 Grover Cleveland became the only man before Trump to return to the presidency after having been defeated four years earlier (the man who had beaten him was Harrison’s grandson Benjamin, who won the White House despite losing the popular vote). In his second inaugural address, Cleveland made no mention of vindication or of having been robbed last time out. Instead he focused on the evils of creeping paternalism and the growing dependence of Americans on government support. He pledged to restore frugality and efficiency to public administration by stripping out all unwarranted claims on the taxpayer’s dollar. Cleveland’s successor was William McKinley, the man who appears to have replaced Lincoln as Trump’s favourite predecessor. In his first inaugural address, McKinley talked at length about the need for sound money as well as insisting on the ‘severest economy’ in public expenditure. In his second inaugural four years later he boasted of having achieved both, while also reasserting American power overseas.

Trump’s speech on Monday sounded nothing like either of McKinley’s. It wasn’t merely boastful but staggeringly narcissistic. Unlike Cleveland, he revelled in his return and forced his defeated opponents to sit through a thorough trashing of their record. Unlike Harrison, he brought his audience in from the brutal cold and did it all in the cosy setting of the Capitol Rotunda. Yet despite this, there is something 19th-century about Trump’s politics. He cited McKinley – a ‘great president’ and a ‘natural businessman’ – as someone who had used tariff policy to enrich the nation. He made no mention of the dollar but neither, more surprisingly, did he discuss crypto, despite the fact that the recently launched memecoin $TRUMP looks set to make his family billions. He reminded his audience of the economies about to be unleashed by the Department of Government Efficiency, as its cost-cutter in chief, Elon Musk, looked lovingly on. He talked about changing names on the map. He promised a new era of frontier spirit and international aggrandisement. He sounded like he wished it was 1896 all over again.

The period of American politics that Trump really wants to consign to the history books is the one that’s only just past. He makes the pronouncements of his immediate predecessors seem as though they come from another age. Obama’s second inaugural address in 2013 now reads like the dusty catechism of a bygone era. ‘We cannot mistake absolutism for principle,’ he said, ‘or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.’ It turns out that yes, we can. America, Obama insisted, ‘will respond to the threat of climate change … The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition.’ He took for granted a narrative of social progress: a lodestar ‘that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears, through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall’. ‘Preserving our individual freedoms,’ he said, ‘ultimately requires collective action.’ He wasn’t wrong. But he was mistaken.

Trump’s second inaugural address was Obama’s with everything turned inside out. It wasn’t simply his celebration of fossil fuels – ‘liquid gold’ – and his refusal to countenance any higher calling than that of making money from oil. Neither was it his proud announcement that the name of the highest peak in North America, Denali in Alaska, would be restored to Mount McKinley (Obama officially recognised the name used by Indigenous inhabitants, and the State of Alaska, in 2015). What made it so utterly different was Trump’s refusal to be reverential, even when the occasion seemed to demand it. His lack of piety is his unique calling-card as a politician and as a president. Obama and his speechwriters revelled in the requirement of the modern inaugural address to adapt any political message to the idea that there is something in the American experiment and American experience that transcends mere politics. Trump and his speechwriters revel in the repudiation of all that. Every inaugural address before Trump’s first – and now his second – at least nodded to the notion that the administration to come was part of something bigger and more enduring than itself. McKinley did it. Nixon did it. Bush did it. Trump sees whatever is bigger and more enduring as simply a part of his forthcoming presidency.

This is most apparent when Trump is forced to play along as though he were like other politicians. He can’t do it for more than a moment. This time, in the run-up to his swearing in, he sat stony-faced through a traditionally high-minded introduction from Senator Amy Klobuchar – there as chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – though even he felt obliged to join in the ritual applause when she paid tribute to the heroism of firefighters battling the blazes in Los Angeles. When it was his turn a few minutes later, however, he trashed the rescue effort and, depending on how you interpret his remarks, indulged himself at the expense of those who had suffered the consequences or gave a nod to conspiracy theorists (‘Some of [the people] sitting here right now don’t have a home any longer … That’s interesting’). In his speech he did what incoming presidents often do by listing the seemingly insuperable barriers that Americans have overcome in the past to show that they could do it again. It was a pretty conventional recitation – ‘[We] won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand’ – and suitably adapted it could have come from the inaugural addresses of many of his predecessors. (It is also oddly close to the peroration at the end of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, where he lists America’s triumphs against the odds to insist that if they accomplished all that, they could fix climate change too.) But Trump, uniquely, caps the story of American achievement with a final, unparalleled accomplishment, a living embodiment of the maxim ‘There is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.’ ‘Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback. But as you see today, here I am … I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do.’ There is nothing that Trump can’t reduce to his level.

The mistake that many of his opponents have made is to assume that his absence of reverence is a weakness they can exploit. Michelle Obama didn’t attend his second inauguration (she sat stoically through his first), having let it be known that she no longer has the stomach for this sort of thing. When Trump was one of those mocking and belittling her husband during his second term, she famously said: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ How did that work out? For a long time, including during his first administration, it has been tempting for Democrats to think of Trump as making a mockery of the ideals of public service, as though he were some kind of incendiary prankster, the boy who sets fire to the priest’s robes while he is trying to deliver a sermon. But that’s not who he is at all. He is more like the boy who has sat through too many interminable sermons thinking about what fun he could have if he were up there instead. Setting it all on fire is a way of taking it seriously. Taking it over is a way of making it whatever you want it to be.

Trump​ is not the end of the American system of constitutional government. But he is an inversion of it. He represents many of the things it was created to guard against, including the politics of personal grievance and private greed. His 19th-century forerunners would have seen this more clearly than some of his immediate predecessors, for whom politics tended to be reduced to electoral rather than constitutional considerations. The question Trump’s opponents want answered is whether he can get away with it. Will his coalition hold, will his policies backfire, will his party baulk, will his rivals circle, will his cheerleaders lose heart, will he ever meet an effective resistance? But there is another question. What happens when he does get away with it? Traditional American political language has a word for what comes next. It’s called spoils.

The vision of politics that Trump laid out in his second inaugural address – much more so than in his first – is not dissimilar to a money-making scheme. The words ‘rich’ or ‘enrich’ appeared four times; the word ‘money’ appeared just as often. He announced the creation of an ‘External Revenue Service’ to collect all tariffs, duties and revenues. ‘It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our Treasury coming from foreign sources.’ There was no mention of whether Congress would approve such a scheme, and no discussion of who would police it. He said he would embark immediately on a series of executive orders designed to secure the border, and would instruct his cabinet to bring down prices. Again, no mention of how. The new Department of Government Efficiency is intended to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget. But it also putatively means placing the power to hire and fire in the hands of the world’s richest man. You do not need to have a massively bloated government in order to operate a spoils system, as 19th-century politicians understood. All you need is an unaccountable government. In many ways, it’s easier if the remit is narrower. Corruption thrives on the politics of personal relationships and private fiefdoms. Inevitably, Trump’s personal relationships will corrode quickly, as they did the first time around. He and Musk are unlikely to remain friends for long. But this time he comes into office with much more patronage at his disposal, given his secure mandate, his party’s control of the various branches of government and his determination not to let the opportunity slip. The presence at his inauguration of America’s richest men – tousled Zuckerberg and gleaming Bezos alongside Musk with his pinched, jowly, Ozempic-ravaged face, each of them looking like a panel from a medieval morality painting – is testament to how much more Trump has to offer in his second term than he did in his first. He is promising feeding time at the trough.

Of course, Trump believes that he is going to root out corruption, not inaugurate a new age of it. But the corruption he is talking about is ideological rather than personal: what he sees as the infiltration of the ‘woke mind virus’ into the federal bureaucracy and the politics of lawfare into the justice department. Compared to that, what’s a little bit of graft? He may be right that what was meant by corruption in the 19th century doesn’t worry people so much in the 21st, at least when compared to what else is going on. After all, it’s not as though Zuckerberg and Bezos need any more money, even if they seem slavishly eager to acquire it. If there’s corruption in their relationships with government, it’s fair to assume that much of it has happened already. At the same time, Trump has done a good job of making squeamishness about obscene wealth seem like one of the relics of a passing era. It’s hard to moralise when the platforms built or acquired by Zuckerberg, Musk and others have made all gestures of faith in established institutions an invitation to mockery. In the social media age, piety only works if you can make it your personal brand, in which case it’s not really piety. Everything else is sanctimony.

But the institutions of the American republic are built on faith and require the public to have some degree of faith in them if they are to continue to function. This is not the sort of showy religious faith that was being sprayed around at Trump’s inauguration by the spokesmen of various denominations, each of whom tried to outdo the others in their insistence that Trump’s presence among them was a gift from God. They were simply burnishing the brand (unlike the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, who in her sermon at the inaugural prayer service did at least try to get Trump to think about how other people were feeling, for all the good that it did). But the currency, the national debt, the law courts: these are things that people have to believe in if they are to work to their benefit. If confidence in the durability of the dollar, or the creditworthiness of the government, or the impartiality of the law, falls away it can be hard to get it back. That – pious as it seems – is the message that previous inaugural addresses have tried to reinforce as best they can. But not this one. Poor Obama had to sit there on Monday and witness the mistaking of absolutism for principle and spectacle for politics. I don’t think Trump mistakes them – he doesn’t care enough to mind what passes for what. But the people in the audience who got up and applauded throughout his speech – as Biden and Harris and the Clintons and the Bushes remained glumly in their seats – have mistaken them. They think they will reap the rewards of what follows. But they will also pay the price.