Trump’s Back. What Now?

t’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.

Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.

But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”

His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!

His promised day-one executive orders included:

Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”

Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)

Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”

Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.

And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)

Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.

“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “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.”

Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.

It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.

Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”

Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”

Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act

Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.

Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.

Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?