Will Trump forget his allies?

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with which he would have tried to fill the chilly air on the steps of the Capitol was even more exciting inside the crowded Rotunda. Only feet away from Trump, poor Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and behind them the Clintons shrank in their places, like captives paraded in ancient Rome after a military triumph. I experienced contradictory reactions. On the one hand, I felt a surge of joy that an American president at last has the confidence to do obviously right things — control the southern border, get out of the Paris Agreement, exploit America’s huge reserves of oil and gas, create a situation in which “You’ll be able to buy the car of your choice,” remove all social and ethnic engineering from government policy, replacing it with one that is “color-blind and merit-based” and assert the existence of only two genders in same, stop public education which teaches pupils to hate their country, leave the World Health Organization and, yes, restore to Denali in Alaska its former American name of Mount McKinley. All of the above may be controversial but come under the category President Trump himself employed of “common sense.” How did the world’s greatest nation ever stray from such sensible things? Why did the world have to wait for a right-wing white president to restore the idea of Martin Luther King that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character?

There was also something powerful in Trump’s evocation of American history, though it was simultaneously corny and contentious. The “spirit of the frontier” does mean something, and there is more to be proud of than ashamed in a nation which “won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty… split the atom [though it didn’t] and put the universe of human knowledge in the palm of the human hand.” America “won two world wars” and “defeated fascism and communism.” All true, though not the whole truth. His very male summary of the achievements of “farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steel workers and coal miners, police officers and pioneers who pushed onward” is so little uttered now that it seemed like a bold new thought. Trump is popular with people all over the world who mostly lack power and freedom. He expresses, in a filmic, highly colored way, the essence of his country which they admire. Those who feel they are losing look up to man who loves, above all, to win.

This is where God gets a look-in too. On that day in Butler, Pennsylvania when the assassin’s bullet only grazed the once and future president’s ear, he believes the Almighty saved him for a purpose and intervened decisively enough to win him those seven swing states. Once upon a time, Mr. Trump was not perhaps terribly interested in God — who was widely reported to be a never-Trumper — but now he sees Him as one of his greatest supporters, second only to Elon Musk. This, too, is a very American way of thinking and will give him great strength and popularity. At the ceremony, some brilliantly over-the-top black minister, who daringly used the forbidden phrase “negro spiritual,” called upon God to let freedom ring from the “curvaceous hilltops of California” to the “hills and molehills of Mississippi” and numerous other American beauty spots. I must admit the tears came to my eyes.

On the other hand, I felt, as I stared at the television, foreboding. One must not judge Trump by the color of his skin (which is orange), but if one looks at the content of his character one can hardly trust his promise that “the scales of justice will be rebalanced,” though they will certainly be differently tilted. The January 6 protestors whom he pardoned may not, perhaps, have been seriously attempting an insurrection, but they behaved atrociously and would not have done so if he had discouraged them. By pardoning them, he weakens the rule of law (as does Biden by pardoning his family).

Mr. Trump spoke much about how good his America would be for the world, but a key word missing was “allies.” Failure to consider even the existence, let alone the benefit, of such entities means that he will add needlessly to his list of enemies. He should realize that lots of countries now want to be his friends and make the most of it.

As for his economic promises, Mr. Trump undoubtedly raised the animal spirits that recovery famously requires — to positively bestial levels. He creates an exhilarating sense of possibility. But is it likely that he will cut, overall, the size of government spending or borrowing? What will his promises look like when boom turns to bust and crypto turns criminal? He said of McKinley, the mountain man, that he restored American greatness by “tariffs and talent.” Surely the former, overall and over time, always end up stifling the latter?

For Britain, there is at least one conclusion to be drawn from January 20, 2025, which President Trump calls Liberation Day. It is that net zero will not be achieved by 2050. It was probably impossible anyway, but without America it certainly is. Even Ed Miliband must understand this logic. So he will soon have either to capitulate or resign. Given the moralistic content to his character, it will likely be the latter, confirming that climate-catastrophe theory is a mania, like seventeenth century Anabaptism.

The absence of Michelle Obama from the ceremony has been much commented on, but no one seems to have made the obvious point: her absence will stand her in good stead if she seeks the Democratic nomination for 2028. “I never took the knee to tyranny,” she would say, and the base would love her.