Meet The New Boss...

Well here are: Trump 2.0 is official and four years of Christ knows what has commenced in The Capitol. A long and predictable inauguration speech - tele-prompted, naturally - offered a vision of an isolationist American Republic with all the usual tropes of conservatism: border security, law & order, social conservatism and an expansionist economic and geopolitical view of the world. He made much of the MAGA creed and of the defence of America from its enemies, whomever they are and wherever they might be. Pretty safe ground for someone preaching to the converted. His stated aim to nix all climate-change legislation and 'drill, Baby, drill...' should be of major concern to all of us: here's a guy who believes that the California wildfires disaster was the fault of Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular. A guy who manifestly has little grasp on the realities of the world in the twenty-first century.

However, many of his sympathisers who attended the ceremony and who stood and applauded in all the right places looked uncomfortable and less than happy at the spectacle of their new incumbent pushing all the dog-whistle buttons; even, at one point, seemingly and worryingly, to echo a rhetorical trope of Adolf Hitler's: 'one people, one nation...' etc. He stopped short of the final '...one leader.', but the echoes resound nevertheless, and whilst comparisons with Adolf Hitler are at present premature and probably hysterically and historically unjustifiable, the jury's out until further notice, methinks. If I were an American, however, I'd be more than a little concerned about the upcoming four years, because I suspect the whole thing will be an asset-stripping exercise for the global Über-wealthy like Elon Musk, whose grinning physiognomy was carefully zoomed in on by the cameras as soon as Trump made a sub-JFK pitch on planting the Stars & Stripes on Mars [he himself either missed the implied attack on his EV and battery business by Trump or has already decided that space is the place and the Earth can go hang]. Oh, and not one mention of the First People of America throughout, despite his apparent inclusiveness of African Americans and American Latinos: telling in the extreme.

About the only saving grace in the whole charade was when the scheduled finale performance of "America the Beautiful" was interrupted by about a minute of technical cock-up [deliciously deliberate?] silence, leaving the singer, Trump and everyone else standing there like lemons: a bit like the Theresa May conference set malfunction some years ago [noteworthy is that the BBC commentary tried to explain(?) the silence as a break in the audio feed from the event]. The only people who saw the funny side of this were Biden and Harris, who could barely conceal their grins from the cameras. For a media-savvy operator like Trump, you might have expected him to have got back on the microphone and to have made light of the glitch; but no. The man has no powers of improvisation and insufficient native wit to depart from the script, and this is the very great worry that the American people - and the wider world, over which America wields so much power and influence - should harbour. Re-electing a President whose sole motivations are the acquisition of money and popularity through power is an exceedingly dangerous course to follow. History cannot be undone, but the future is ours to create, should we so choose...