🧵 If you listened/watched, you know that Trump's second inaugural address was mostly a tired reprisal of the first.
America has been un-manned and betrayed. We’ve lost our sovereignty and safety, and the corrupt establishment has run roughshod over ordinary citizens. All this will change. Trump alone can fix it. This is the dawn of a new golden age. Liberation Day.
So there is no Trump v.2.0. We're getting v.1.1. Same glitchy thing as 2017, with maybe a few bugs squashed.
That doesn't mean he's not dangerous.
Lots of stuff about our nation's glorious destiny. Frontier spirit. Territorial expansion, including to Mars (via Panama). All of this is needed to restore and revitalize "the world's greatest civilization."
Trump is ready to take us back to the 19th C. Age of Empire. He sees the world in terms of a civilizational hierarchy. He understands history as a Darwinian struggle. Power is all that matters, not law, not justice, not rights.
Domestically, the cleanse is coming. Trump said he will use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rid our cities of criminal gangs, stop immigration at the souther border, and defend the country from threats and invasions "at a level nobody has ever seen before."
Important to remember that this law also criminalized writing deemed to be critical of the government.
So "mass deportation now" is also a direct attack on free speech.
We also got "drill, baby, drill," a love song for "liquid gold," and the rhetoric of petro-politics.
Trump says he intends to sign an order today that "will end the Green New Deal."
This is a planetary threat far greater than any coercive land grab or militarization of the border.
Trump said he will be a peacemaker and unifier, but he also said that "social engineering" of race and gender will stop under his presidency. "It will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female."
So it's not a war on woke ideology, so much as a war on transgender and non-binary Americans.
I'll only add here that Trump promised at the outset of the speech to "annihilate" any challenges to his program of renewal.
Finally, the speech is full of funny math and fudged numbers. He says there is a mandate for his "revolution of common sense." He says that the election shows that "the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda."
Trump got 49.9 percent of the popular vote (73.3 million votes). More than 262 million Americans did not vote for him. 75 million voted AGAINST him.
Trump has the trifecta.
He has been given free rein by SCOTUS.
He has billionaires galore.
He does not have a mandate.
Resist much, obey little.
The Republic belongs to us, no less than the MAGA clique. Our vision of America may be out of power, but it has enduring moral substance.
Nihilism is swirling in DC. Many have embraced the chance to behave badly. Don't let the darkness into your hearts.
<fin>
Alexander Karn
Rich Stein (he/him)