On both occasions, the federal city was filled to capacity. “Beds! beds! beds!” was the general cry in 1837. Many visitors had spent the previous night sleeping rough, in barns and markets and even barbers’ chairs. And so it was in 2025, with even mid-market hotels charging upwards of $1,500 per room. Both inaugurations were similarly marked by the irreverence and boozy rowdiness typical of populist movements, Jacksonian democracy in Van Buren’s case, Trumpism yesterday.

Watching the swearing-in remotely, from the Capital One Arena, I chuckled at the partisan fandom. Prominent Democrats drew boos from the crowd, while Republicans got applause. But when Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, appeared side-by-side, the crowd booed. “Wait, what did poor Mike Johnson do?”, I asked my companion. Then, as if collectively regretting their drive-by booing of the innocent Johnson, most of the arena audience refrained from booing or cheering when members of both parties showed up together on the jumbotrons.

Trump, inevitably, received roars of approval and standing ovations. Not much at first, when he was strangely subdued and his delivery halting. But as he gathered steam, so too did the audience. The greatest clamour of approval came when he pledged to make it the “official policy of the United States government” to recognize only two genders: male and female. Other crowd favorites included “Drill, baby, drill”; his vow to “take back” the Panama Canal; and, of course, his crackdown at the border.

It turns out that doing popular things can make for good politics. Democrats today don’t seem to grasp this banal truism, but their own party’s Jacksonian founders did, whether it was dismantling the Second Bank of the United States, an institution that had come to be hated by much of the public for the imperious role it played in the early republic’s politics (even as it fulfilled important economic functions); or imposing the first legal limitation on the length of the workday; or expanding the democratic franchise to white men without property.

Trump’s instincts hew much closer to those of Jacksonian Democrats than his own party’s intellectual class, and he has no problem proclaiming the popular. Precisely because progressivism has come to be associated with paper straws, congestion fees, and diminished expectations, Trump gains the upper hand simply by promising good things to come, even as some of his brain-storms veer into the preposterous — such as a military invasion to bring Greenland under American control.

Yet the deepest historical echo yesterday had to do with political coalitions. To wit, “Jacksonism” — the worldview associated with Van Buren’s predecessor and ex-boss, Andrew Jackson — raged against “the money power” that oppressed workers and farmers. But his coalition also included grasping entrepreneurs, local bankers, slave-owning planters, along with other interests who were by no means opposed to capitalism, but saw in Jackson a chance to make the system work better for them.

And so it was with Trump. On the one hand, Trump in his Inaugural Address attacked the “corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair”. On the other, he invited to the dais business leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose firms took once the lead in promoting the corporate “wokeness” reviled by Trump’s base.

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Europe is clinging to yesterday

By Wolfgang Munchau

More than a mere dais seat, Elon Musk has been presented with his own government department, to which the Tesla and SpaceX boss hopes to recruit a team of “small-government crusaders”. He says he aims to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget —surely impossible without cutting those entitlement programs that Trump and the Republican platform have promised never to touch. So we are left wondering which Trumpism will prevail: the one that explicitly appeals to trade unionists (as the President also did in his address), or the one that (for now) adores Musk as a (Roman) demigod?

But for one day, at least, the American Right’s various factions pressed pause on their bickering to celebrate Trump’s remarkable comeback saga: from January 6 through the barrage of indictments and convictions of the past four years, he has made it back to the summit of earthly power. But the tensions will erupt soon enough. Already, Congress’s TikTok ban and visa program disputes have divided the movement’s populist base and Silicon Valley funders.

Further reading

Donald Trump's second coming

By Christopher Caldwell

Judging by the inauguration, the latter are everywhere in the new Washington. They were at every fringe event, dinner, and party that I attended. Trumpism now contains within itself a downscale base that sings “glory, glory, hallelujah!” and yearns for restoring industrial jobs, and an affluent element that promotes longevity through plasma transfusions and who would automate most jobs out of existence.

Can these two competing impulses be synthesized?

Here, the Jacksonian example isn’t so helpful. While Jackson, Van Buren and their ilk did indeed smash the Second Bank of the United States, this redounded mostly to the benefit of their business allies; the workers and smallholders in turn were handed a brief depression and a surge in inflation caused by a surfeit of wildcat bankers, followed by decades during which the United States suffered from a much higher rate of banking crises than comparable industrial powers with more centralized financial systems. But for all its flaws, the hated administrative institution did help discipline the flow of credit.

There are, however, more successful reform models in the American political tradition. Particularly germane is what the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr dubbed “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends”: a willingness to ally with and use big institutions and wealth, whether public or private, in service of the Jeffersonian vision of a competent, modestly propertied citizenry — the American Dream, if you like. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, and JFK all echoed this to varying degrees, with varying degrees of success.

But such an approach would require a willingness to discipline Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk, including by mobilizing public opinion against them. The state must lead business, even if business leaders are allowed great closeness to state power and invited to participate in politics. FDR, for example, warned firms against defying his labor and competition reforms: “There is no group in America that can withstand the force of an aroused public opinion.”

At the Commander-in-Chief Ball on Monday night, where the majority of guests were members of the armed forces and their families, the cheering, whooping, and military-style “Hooahs!” for Trump and his team were deafening. “Welcome back, President Trump, your warriors had missed you,” declared a Medal of Honor recipient from the podium. “He’s just with us,” an Air Force man told me. “I don’t care about this or that policy. He has our backs.”

At least for now, Trump has that dangerous “force” of public opinion on his side to an extent that wasn’t the case the first time he was elected — and that hasn’t been the case for a Republican president in a generation. As one official who had served in the first Trump administration told me, “Every 40 years or so, the Jackson spirit comes back to stir things up in this country. The question is what you do with it.”

Trump has never been known for learning on the job. That’s actually what people like about him. Learning on the job suggests adaptability, a character flaw for a public that believes Washington corrupts politicians. His gifts and drawbacks are those he had in 2016 and in 1983. His attorney general nomination of Matt Gaetz, a man who would never have been confirmed by the Senate, was a classic Trump move. It was reminiscent of eight years ago.

American history has produced presidents less capable than Donald Trump — two this century — but never has one done a worse job of staffing his administration than he did in 2016. It was perhaps understandable that a civil service he had accused of corruption was not enthusiastic about his arrival. With some exceptions in the world of trade and finance, top-level bureaucrats carried out a leadership strike of the sort Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. It was an impasse unprecedented in American history; perhaps the closest analogy was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sudden 2003 appointment as prime minister in Turkey — when he was forced to call on unaffiliated Muslim movements to fill technical positions that his pious provincials could not.

Trump found himself with the wrong Republican Party. A man committed to cleaning up government was at the head of a machine that was good for nothing except cutting government, which is a different thing. The only “Trump Republican” was Trump. Since then though, something powerful has got underway in his party — and out of his view. For all Trump’s hesitations, those who believed in the simple idea of disrupting American power relations have begun to network and organize spontaneously. The Trumpians have overrun the Republican Party, turning their conservative establishment adversaries of 2016 (Liz Cheney, for example) into Biden Democrats, and consolidating the remainder around Trump. They have also been whipped into ideological discipline by what they see as the persecution their candidate underwent — at the hands of not just the Biden Administration but also the rebellious civil service. This Trump White House will be run by the hard-driving Floridian Susie Wiles, who believes in his mission so much that she ditched Florida governor Ron DeSantis when he was riding highest in order to join it.

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Liberalism won't survive 2025

By Aris Roussinos

The Democrats’ power to resist Trumpism, meanwhile, has evaporated. The process might be familiar to those who paid attention to the stymying of Brexit in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Brexit opponents declared in newspapers and before cameras that the British public were having second thoughts, that the execution of Brexit was a shambles, that it had been an impossible project to start with. But it didn’t look that way to the Brexiteers. It appeared the project was being sabotaged from within by a few actors who stood at chokepoints and pulled tricks: Theresa May’s negotiators, Commons speaker, John Bercow, legal activist Gina Miller and the Supreme Court. After more than three years of obstruction, Brexit passed only because of a magnificently synthesized repertoire of counter-strategies devised by Dominic Cummings.

At the same time, the United States was undergoing something analogous. The day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, an open public resistance started with the so-called Women’s March. Twitter, at the time owned by Jack Dorsey, was aggressively policing Trump supporters’ tweets. There was also a coordinated sabotaging of the Trump Administration from inside. In September 2018 an anonymous top-ranking administration official wrote an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, detailing techniques of obfuscation, non-cooperation and leaking within the administration. Things continued like this until Trump’s impeachment in 2019, which was the last thing that happened in the United States before Covid, just as Brexit was the last thing that happened in Britain. Trump failed where Boris Johnson succeeded.

Trumpism never found its Dominic Cummings — someone capable of purging the old party and designing a strategy for the new. In fact, it still has not. Such people are rare because they are temperamentally implausible: they must be both intensely attracted and intensely repelled by government chicanery. The closest Trump came was his aide Steven Miller, then as now described most often as his consigliere — which is a different thing.

Somehow, the tide has turned nonetheless, leaving Democrats in Washington in a mood of utter demoralization. Why, they ask, did the American public, knowing Trump better than it did in previous elections, return him to power? What they cannot see is that the public has come to see wokeness not as a progressive values system but as simply the most important of the Resistance’s bag of tricks.

Trump was indeed discredited by all the new revelations after he left office. But the Resistance discredited itself faster than it discredited him — partly through the various kangaroo-court “trials” to which Democratic Party-connected prosecutors subjected Trump, and partly through campaigns against “disinformation”, which voters rightly came to view as campaigns for censorship. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, in October 2022, dramatically changed the ground rules of this conflict — there was no longer a reliable way for the Biden Administration to steer news coverage on social media and to bottle up coverage of its own scandals.

The new media environment has given Trump a bit of ideological breathing room. He now aims to staff his administration with activists, as he could not the last time around. There is Kash Patel, the House Intelligence Committee investigator, tapped to become director of the FBI. It was Patel who traced 2017 allegations of Russian interference to a report paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s proposed head of the Federal Trade Commission, who sees political boycotts as “concerted refusals to deal”, and thus as anti-trust violations. There is Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and Trump nominee for Director of Central Intelligence, deplored by Democrats for her coolness to Biden’s Ukraine war efforts. Not all of his nominees will be confirmed — but there are at least places on the internet where a robust argument over them can take place. In the surveilled social-media environment that prevailed during his last term, they would have been caricatured and drubbed.

Enhanced access to a public megaphone has made Trump stronger against his own party too. Though he sings the praises of meritocracy, his focus is on loyalty. Pete Hegseth, nominee for defense secretary, has the right orientation for a Trumpian reform of the military: he believes it should be a place for developing “war-fighters”, and wants to purge it of woke training exercises. But his threadbare résumé (army major, TV pundit) and volatile character arose as issues in last week’s hearings. Historically, senators, with their six-year terms, have been sufficiently buffered against bullying to defy presidents on confirmation votes. Trump’s domination of Right-leaning social media, however, seems to be providing him with the information-age equivalent of parliamentary whipping. It has already worked on Iowa senator Joni Ernst, previously a skeptic towards Hegseth, who now says she will vote for him.

Trumpism held together in the face of relentless resistance because it actually turned out to be about something real, even if Trump never fully understood the varied discontents for whom he had somehow became a tribune. Time has revealed his movement as not only more anti-woke but also more multi-racial and more high-tech than it first appeared. And some Trump cadres have a more sophisticated understanding now of why and how the government is failing.

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Donald Trump's strange sincerity

By Christopher Caldwell

With no stake in the old Beltway elite, they speak of power being disaggregated — radically disaggregated. It is not just that they seek innovative ways of delivering government services, like the people who urged privatization in the Eighties and public-private partnerships in the Nineties. The information-age understanding, right or wrong, is that there are certain cutting-edge things that the government shouldn’t be doing at all. Why are there two private individuals — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — with more ambitious space programs than NASA? What is a treasury in an age of cryptocurrencies? Might Syria’s acquisition of a neutral security force, a few trade relationships, a couple of infrastructure projects, be as good for the country as any “peace plan”? We begin to understand the wild speculation that Trump has indulged in discussing, for instance, acquiring Greenland. These could all be crazy ideas. But unlike earlier critiques of bureaucracy, they appear set to revolutionize government itself, not just the way it buys things.

Such ideas could also be the greatest source of tension in the Trump Administration. To run the world’s largest country — to say nothing of the empire connected to it — is a task of consummate intellectual complexity. Trumpism needs a lot of brain fuel, and the establishment still has a grip on most credentialed intellects. The constitutional understanding that cabinet advisers be hired with the “advice and consent” of the Senate is at odds with the role that will be played at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. (Assuming the latter is not appointed to fill the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by incoming vice president J.D. Vance, as has been rumored in recent days.) But more importantly, the agenda of such informal “kitchen cabinet” appointees risks violating the basic populist economic bargain of Trumpism.

This bargain, as practiced in Trump’s first term, was to sacrifice some of GDP in order to assure its better distribution. The public seems to like it. Trump backed a strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association aimed at blocking the automation of three dozen American seaports, winning him applause from trade unions when the strike was settled in early January. But it will be costly for shippers and consumers, and the world economy is not traveling in that direction.

When Trump left office in 2021, artificial intelligence was no more than a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye. But the current understanding of AI complicates things terribly. As the entrepreneur Dario Amodei put it in an influential recent paper, once AI kicks in — and that could be before the end of the decade — it will allow us to compress a century’s worth of science into five or ten years. So the country that locks in a two-year advantage could dominate the world for the foreseeable future. It could be Trump’s America, but it could also be China.

An administration that looks at things this way will be desperately activist and prone to take positions that had not been thinkable just a few months before. Dark visions of technological acceleration appear likely to pit the most energetic (capitalistic) parts of the Trump base against the most loyal (populist) part. The spat between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon over visas for engineers could be only the beginning of a wider conflict. The Trump coalition, as mighty as it is, may soon face a choice between tempering the populism that is its raison d’être or incurring the wrath of the tech bosses who have rallied to its side. That is the challenge that will determine whether Trumpism outlives Trump.

But this operation, which reportedly consisted of 25,000 military personnel — not including the innumerable federal, state, and local law enforcement officials on the ground — was another thing altogether. Downtown DC had been transformed into a brazenly fortified, militarised zone unlike anything in living memory. Roads were blocked off by oversized armoured vehicles which had been stationed for maximum visibility. The boarding-up of endless storefronts — a result of both the Covid-related economic downturn and prolonged riot-induced anxiety — added to the sense of dystopia.

Soldiers patrolled with large rifles slung around their shoulders, directing traffic and checking the “papers” of motorists. One Guardsman from Pennsylvania told me that “legitimate business” was the standard by which they were to adjudicate whether cars would be allowed to pass through.

The rifles brandished by many of the troops were conspicuously without a magazine loaded. This is not uncommon for a peacetime mission. The aim was evidently not to subdue any kind of imminent, actionable threat that would require live ammunition, as many politicians and journalists had frantically warned was the case, but to simply act as a gigantic deterrent.

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Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

That objective was apparently accomplished. I did not see a single protester anywhere in the city on Inauguration Day, much less any “insurrectionists” or “armed rebels” trawling around, as had been so gravely forecast. The FBI (then still technically under the jurisdiction of Donald Trump) had warned that all 50 state Capitols were at severe risk, and therefore also needed to fortify their defences with military deployments and obtrusive fencing and barriers. Then the day came and went, and… nothing. In both Albany, NY, and Sacramento, CA a total of one Trump hat-wearing man showed up at each.

And so Joe Biden was sworn in without incident, appealing for “unity”, while the city surrounding him was essentially under full-scale military occupation. The night before, I saw multiple platoons marching the streets in two-by-two formation — en route to who knows where. The general public couldn’t get anywhere close to the Inauguration site, the interior of which had been cordoned off with barbed wire. The few stragglers who hopelessly tried to enter the outskirts of the National Mall — mostly foreign media desperate for a story — were fooled by the Secret Service into standing in a line-to-nowhere that never moved.

It was the refusal of American media to question the necessity of these extraordinary measures that will be one of the longest-lasting consequences of the entire bizarre affair. It confirmed that journalists will uncritically accept extravagant shows of intrusive state force, so long as the political incentives are correctly aligned. During the riots in the summer, the US media generally reacted with horror to the prospect of the American military being deployed to allay “civil unrest,” with many claiming that it would be tantamount to white supremacy for soldiers to deter arson attacks against small minority-owned businesses and private residences.

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The day QAnon captured America

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

But place DC under complete military occupation as a final rebuke to Trump and his shameful supporters, and the show of state force is to be celebrated rather than adversarially probed. Particularly with Democrats now controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, the wisdom of this occupation is probably never going to be examined in any meaningful way. Will we ever learn how much it cost taxpayers? Doubtful.

The rationale for the occupation was made all the more questionable by the feckless behaviour of Trump, who, after the goofball mob intrusion at the Capitol, essentially retreated from public view: the opposite of what you’d expect from a tyrannical ruler desperate to cling to power. He admitted defeat, denounced those rioters who’d been under the illusion that he was some kind of Messiah, and actively discouraged any further action that could be remotely described as “insurrectionary”.

Perhaps his Twitter ban has shattered his world more than we thought. As he slunk away to Florida on Wednesday morning in humiliation and disrepute — the first former president to not attend his successor’s inauguration since the also-impeached Andrew Johnson in 1869 — the hysterical fantasies of him leading some bonafide “coup” attempt dissipated into confirmed absurdity.

Ultimately, Trump was a master at commercialising and, later, politicising a mass market audience — it is, after all, the skillset he cultivated over 12 years on primetime reality TV. He was never a political visionary of any sort, and so the bold image ascribed to him, by both his most diehard boosters and detractors, was always bound to crumble into tragicomical nothingness.

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Impeachment is more dangerous than Trump

By Michael Tracey

He issued a series of pardons in the dead of night just before leaving office that typified the personality quirks that defined his spasmodic approach to governance. Rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black received clemency, as well as corrupt former Congressmen and assorted others whose representatives successfully gamed the process with the flattery required to get him to do anything. Meanwhile, the cross-ideological lobbying push for pardons for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange — each genuine antagonists of the “Deep State” that Trump always claimed to despise — failed.

The idea that Trump’s ideological emptiness was ever going to result in a genuine “seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the government, or could ever challenge the full weight of the American national security state, was a total farce. And although it has now congealed into unassailable mythology, the further idea that what occurred at the Capitol on 6 January amounted to anything more than a temporary self-defeating mob outburst should be put permanently to rest.

But what is not a myth is that such an event can be quickly seized upon to institute all manner of reactive authoritarian measures. Imagine if Trump had deployed that kind of force to suppress protest and imagined “threats” ahead of his second inauguration. There would have been a meltdown of epic proportions, and rightfully so. But because this was done to bookend Trump’s rule and usher him into ignominious retirement, everyone seems content to just move on.

Either way, he’s gone. The Left-liberal establishment has successfully restored itself to power after five years of all-consuming mania, which has probably inflicted irreparable damage to the collective psyche of the body politic. “Fascism,” in other words, was defeated — with a gargantuan military crackdown. Whether the irony will ever be noted remains to be seen.

“I had a vision of a world without Batman,” he muses. “And it was soooo…. boring.”

Today, the American Left is faced with a similar crisis. Donald Trump is, perhaps needless to say, not Batman. (Much as he might like to think otherwise.) But he is interesting, and for quite some time he’s played an essential role in motivating his opponents to action. After all, there’s no Resistance without a powerful force to throw one’s weight against.

For four years, Democrats and a handful of Republicans have looked forward to Trump’s defeat, and with it, an end to the fight. Only now, with the war won and a new president in office, it seems that nobody wants to let go. Not Donald Trump, who spent the last months of his presidency claiming to have been robbed, fomenting insurrection, and getting himself banned from every social media platform — but not his opponents either.

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Biden is the white knight women don't need

By Kat Rosenfield

Trump, with his trashy aesthetics, vulgar xenophobia and thin-skinned arrogance, was the perfect villain. We couldn’t have invented a better one if we’d tried (although we occasionally did anyway, embellishing his idiocy until it became the stuff of legend). And while a free and fair election evicted him from the White House, all evidence indicates that he’s still living rent-free in our heads. We’re not done; we’re still so angry. Where is all that pent-up emotion supposed to go?

A look at the cultural landscape suggests a transference is taking place, with the loathing rippling outward to land on anyone Trump-adjacent. The society pages have taken up jeering at the President’s various progeny, particularly Ivanka and Jared, whose impending social death amongst the New York elite is the stuff schadenfreude is made of. “Ivanka Trump apparently thinks she’s going to ride this insurrection out and be president one day,” reads one Vanity Fair headline. At the same time, political activists are intent on hounding Trump’s enablers out of public life; in publishing, a petition to bar anyone in the administration from receiving book contracts is currently amassing signatures.

But more than Trump’s friends and family, it’s the still-active MAGA masses who will bear the brunt of our displaced rage. Imagine Trump being toppled from his presidential pedestal and shattering into a thousand sentient pieces, a scurrying horde of mini-Trumps, all with targets on their backs. The several hundred idiots who stormed the Capitol may have failed to overturn the election, but they’ve given new purpose to a cadre of online progressives who want to play Poirot. An entire community has sprung up, devoted to identifying the rioters foolish enough to attempt a coup unmasked and on camera. The pink-hatted women who marched en masse against Trump in January 2016 have found a new calling this year, honey-trapping the rioters on dating apps and reporting them to the FBI.

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What will the New York Times do when Trump goes?

By Sam Leith

Meanwhile, the Left’s calls to defund the police have fallen abruptly silent; instead, we fantasise about more laws, more cops, more ways to wield our newfound authority against these Trumpist transgressors.The protest movement that defined us last year, the mass national outcry against police impunity and unbridled authoritarianism? As it turns out, these things are only a problem if you’re not the person in power. “I hope he can hear the sirens approaching at this very moment,” tweets a self-described advocate for democracy and social justice after one rioter is identified. Another replies, “I hope he hears nothing; a black SUV pulls up along side him at the grocery parking lot, a bag over his head, and they speed off to an undisclosed location.”

Is this Donald Trump’s legacy? Have those of us who thought we were fighting a monster become one ourselves? Six months ago, progressives marched against police overreach and scolded their fellow citizens for calling the cops on looters. Today, these same people fantasise openly about seeing the MAGA rioters behind bars. Activists who used the public sphere of social media to transform a hashtag campaign into a global movement for justice now celebrate the silencing of their political opponents.

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Make way for the first female President

By Kat Rosenfield

And journalists, who have spent four years proclaiming their commitment to boldly speaking truth to power, seem to have forgotten that this is still their job, even when that power has been transferred into the hands of someone they prefer. This shift was already apparent in the lead-up to the election: compare the breathless coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct, from the Access Hollywood tape to the Stormy Daniels scandal, to the general scepticism that greeted Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault by Joe Biden; or the gleeful speculation surrounding Trump’s Russia collusion to the poo-pooing of the peculiar contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But the contrast has been even starker in the months following the election, as some journalists reversed course and decided that they were true patriots after all. Questioning the validity of the election, a favourite pastime back in late 2016, became taboo verging on treason. Faithless electors, once hailed as the great hope for an against-all-odds Hilary Clinton presidency, were now scrutinised as seditionists.

When Trump’s supporters rushed the Capitol, some reporters not only compared it to September 11, but cheered the notion of a Patriot Act-style crackdown on the so-called “domestic terrorists”. Granted, these “terrorists” did not topple any buildings that day, but they did throw an unprecedented tantrum that frightened our lawmakers and got several people killed. Washington Post columnist Max Boot was one of many journalists who called on on our new government overlords to urgently step in: “Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to slow the lies and sedition from Fox and other right-wing broadcasters,” he tweeted. “Or else the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America.”

The fact that this “terrorism” looked less like an organised movement, and more like a group of dogs who unexpectedly, improbably caught the car they were chasing, is irrelevant. In fact, it’s an American tradition: if no genuine plot against the country exists, we can always invent one, cobbled together from scraps to look like something real. A secret Iraqi bunker full of weapons of mass destruction; a secret coup being plotted deep in the bowels of QAnon and Parler.

We have spent four years in a state of energising, symbiotic hatred; we can’t just let it go. Battling Trump gave us a sense of purpose, and in some cases, even a sense of self. Winning, on the other hand, is a dull affair with boring prizes — so much so that many of us are would rather stay where we are, unwilling to declare victory, grinding our defeated opponents into smaller and smaller pieces until there’s nothing left to punish. We are chasing the dragon of outrage just to feel alive again. The fight was what united and defined us. What’s a Resistance warrior to do?

You say that you aim to unite the nation. You pay humble tribute to the voters and to the living presidents in the audience — in which respect, Donald Trump did Biden a favour by skipping the show. You say stirring things about the “American story” and the long tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. And above all you make the maneouvre that Lincoln pinched from Pericles for the Gettysburg Address: you say that you intend to honour the struggles and losses of the past by striving to create a better future.

You sprinkle the speech liberally with well-worn metaphors — crucibles and battles, cries for justice, storms and shadows, light and darkness, foundations shaken, chapters in history written, precious things hanging in balances, beacons beaconing to the world — and high-sounding epithets. Biden pulled “hallowed ground”, “sacred oath”, “soul”, “sacrifice”. “historic moment”, “dignity”, “humbled”, “eternal peace” and many more like them out of the presidential epithet generator. We might sneer, but cliché has its uses: it is reassuring to draw from a common stock of metaphor.

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The President's speech was scarily good

By Sam Leith

It’s not really possible to be too cheesy or too pious on such occasions (President Biden tested this proposition robustly), and it’s not really a great idea to depart from the script for the form of novelty. Especially not now. Biden’s job — amid a pandemic and with five people dead in a riot against the election result — was to play the reassuring mood music of an imperturbable flow of American history. This he did. The trick was to make it sound sincere.

Joe Biden doesn’t share Barack Obama’s lavish oratorical gifts, nor Donald Trump’s unpredictable and combustible energy. But he projected decency and sincerity, and he allowed the odd moment of folksy directness (“Look…” “I get you.” “Here’s the thing about life”) to cut through the flannel. And there was no mistaking his central message. The word “unity” and its cognates appeared more than a dozen times in the speech.

He used the bog-standard toolkit of the formal orator in the grand style. He piled on the anaphora (repeating phrases) and the tricolons (groups of three) and even whacked in the odd chiasmus, such as “we’ll lead not merely by the example of our power but the power of our example”, which would have been even niftier had he not said it before, and Bill Clinton said it before him.

He yoked pairs of words together (syntheton) and gussied it all up with alliteration. He opened the speech by declaring that this was “democracy’s day, a day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve”, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place in an Anglo-Saxon poem — though he borrowed the second phrase, again, from himself borrowing it from Seamus Heaney.

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Who will Biden bomb first?

By Patrick Lawrence

His strongest move was a more modest one: the emphatic repetition. “I know the strength – the strength – of our nation.” “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America […] requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy – unity. Unity.” “We have never, ever, ever, ever failed in America when we’ve acted together.” “We will get through this together. Together.”

In one callback to Lincoln, he recalled how in “another January” (effective way of linking past and present) in 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Biden quoted Lincoln’s words as he signed the paper: “If my name ever goes down into history, it’ll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” Here’s a little electric thrill of connection, not just to a historical moment but to a moment of human feeling. Biden repeated: “My whole soul is in it.”

In using that as the springboard for his next passage — declaring that “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause,” — Biden not only placed himself in Lincoln’s line of descent, but he channeled the emotional appeal of his predecessor for himself. He also, of course, implied that he too might go down in history and reminded his audience, in a time of intense racial argument, that Lincoln himself thought the freeing of the slaves his most important act.

That was deft, and rather moving. Deft, too, was the passage in which he quoted St Augustine.

“Many centuries ago, St Augustine — the saint of my church — wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honour, and yes, the truth.”

Again, that emphatic repetition of the key phrase. And also a pivot: a sort of showy gestalt switch in the way that he would like the American community to see itself. Not as defined by its opposition to a threatening series of out-groups, but by a common set of objects of devotion. He’s making a point, in an age of identity politics, about how identities can be defined — not against things, but for them. It’s not an accident, either, that “truth” capped off that list.

He did not mention the other guy by name. But he was a presence. “Lies told for power and profit” was certainly a jab. The past that this speech needed to look back on was not a single one. It sought to establish the usual connection with the deep past, but also to repudiate the recent past — and put both those things in service of his exhortations for the future. You could see those purposes knit when he said: “We can see each other, not as adversaries, but as neighbors.” Here was one of many feelingly delivered calls for a reset of the ferociously adversarial politics of the last four years; but also a gentle echo of Lincoln’s inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

All that said, this speech could and should have been half or two thirds of the length. A really great peroration — the stirring closing passage of a speech — will linger whole in the mind. Biden’s peroration went on for most of the second half of his rather extensive running time, and the grand-sounding epithets started to blur into each-other. Just when you thought he was going to wrap it up and take a load off, he embarked on another paragraph of unfolding stories, great chapters, debts to forebears and legacies to children’s children’s children. Lord knows, many of us were pleased to see him — but the trick would have been to leave us wanting more.