What Does Trump’s Inauguration Day Mean?

And why that meaning transcends US politics alone.

So today is the day. Today is the day that Trump is inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America. It is a day that has enormous meaning for millions of Americans, both those who love and respect Trump and voted for him, and those who have spent nearly a decade lost in an intense, emotional, media driven hatred of the man and all he represents, or at least all that they have been told he represents.

But it’s an important day too for the rest of the world. It matters to people everywhere in a way that relates to more than just American military and industrial might, in a way that is not merely a reflection of America’s status as a superpower. Power alone does not bring such interest, especially when that power has been declining for some time and comes with a host of unsolved problems.

It could be argued for example that in many ways China is just as powerful as the US now, and in some ways, usually those dependent on the infiltration and subversion of the West, more successful. Look at a chart of which nation was the primary trade partner for the world in the 1980s compared to today and you see that in some ways China has already overtaken the US, or look at the growth of the Chinese military (it’s Navy alone expanding by the size of Frances’s fleet every five years). Look at the growth of Chinese colonialism in Africa, or the way the BRICS alliance has been gradually formed as a rival economic block that is far more effective and successful than any Soviet or Communist sphere of influence in the past.

The Biden era was one in which the installed President both created and reflected the sense that America itself was in a death spiral of final decline. Many of us felt that a second Biden term, or a first Kamala one, would finish the job. The term ‘paper tiger’ could have been invented for a nation which on paper has the biggest military budget in the world, the largest number of billionaires, the largest number of huge companies, a currency the rest of the world has been tied to and influenced by for as long or far longer than most of us have been alive, and which for many years has been described as the leader of the Free World…..but which in reality was utterly humiliated by goat fondling savages in Afghanistan, which was increasingly ignored by friend and foe alike, which was the point of origin for insane modern DEI and ESG obsessions which manifest as the kind of incompetence that deals so poorly with fire, flood and basic responsibilities, and which at every level had become subject to a novel kind of tyranny and an unprecedented degree of corruption, graft, waste and mismanagement.

Power alone does not make Trump’s inauguration and election victory so significant. What makes it so significant is whether or not it is a pivot point in history, an indication that the American Age, the American Supremacy, can rescue itself from what seemed a terminal nose dive. The greatest interest for others comes not from managed decline or even a rapid unravelling of influence and status, but rather from the sense that some huge tectonic shift is underway. It is this sense that has given both China’s ominous rise and Populisms growing defiance of Globalist corruption such importance and meaning. Trump has been at the centre of vast shifting forces. It could be said that Biden was too, but without any agency or meaning beyond what an empty man with a severe mental impairment could, in increasingly rare moments of cogency, grasp for himself from the wreckage his handlers were making.

Trump, whether you love him or loathe him, is a man without handlers, a man defined by his own choices, capable of being deceived or manipulated, but patently incapable of being owned or purchased. As the 2nd term commences despite every legal and illegal attempt to make sure this day never came, the latest Democrat lie is perhaps even more spectacularly delusional than the Trump is Hitler one which preceded it. Today, we are being told that Trump is merely a puppet, a figurehead owned and controlled by Elon Musk who will be the ‘real President’ as Trump merely sits in a chair and signs whatever is placed in front of him.

As ever, this is a spectacular example of projection. Mike Johnson’s recent comments regarding meetings with Biden at which senior Democrats and the head of the CIA were present and in which Johnson learned that Biden had been signing executive orders whose contents he was not mentally competent to judge, is the context in which the ‘Musk is the Real President’ line of attack emerges.

It’s a desperate last gambit, a presentation as unlikely as suddenly declaring that Trump is a metrosexual who takes his policy positions straight from the pages of the New Yorker or Atlantic. The whole reason that the Deep State, the political establishment, the CIA and much of the Even Bigger billionaire donor class have despised and opposed Trump is because of his stubbornly independent minded populism. He has been hated and opposed precisely because he is a man who, very unusually in modern western politics, cannot be purchased or controlled. Yes, he can flattered, and yes, he can be tricked, but the whole terror of his intervention in politics for the established political class has been the knowledge that he cannot be given orders and reliably expected to obey them, especially on key policy areas like border security, whether a war makes sense or whether a deal is a good one for the US taxpayer.

To present Trump now as a mere puppet is a very hard sell. The one thing that TDS sufferers and Trump admirers have agreed on is that he matters, and that he represents a significant departure from the alternatives. Having focused so much hatred on him personally, it’s then difficult to pretend that someone else is the real problem, no matter how enthusiastically Democrats have gone for Musk Derangement Syndrome and no matter how incapable they are of learning from the public rejection of its Trump forebear.

Anti Trump rhetoric is curiously muted on inauguration day, and even the attempts to bully performers into not appearing at the event have been somewhat half-hearted, the reflexive actions of a defeated force. Mainstream media outlets have been reduced to pretending that Trump’s decision to hold the event indoors due to weather conditions is somehow bizarre, when of course Reagan did the exact same thing in 1985. Trump, with that unerring instinct he has for the statements that most expose his opponents, made much of his consideration for the safety of the general public, a line which might be innocuous at other times but which represents a sharp rebuke when contrasted with the disaster responses of the Biden years and the people still suffering in Carolina or recently suffering in California thanks to Democrat malign incompetence.

There was an amusing spin on this aspect of the inauguration in BBC coverage of the event, which ended up providing an unintentional declaration of what the BBC would like to see happen. Discussing Trump’s inauguration being moved indoors due to expected freezing temperatures, the rigorously impartial BBC shared a historical anecdote in a tone of wistful longing:

“In 1841, then-President William Henry Harrison, 68, gave the longest inauguration speech in US history in cold, wet conditions.

He caught a cold and subsequently pneumonia, and died exactly one month later, making his presidency the shortest in US history.”

Reading those lines, you can almost picture a row of BBC journalists gazing into the distance whilst fervently wishing William Henry Harrison’s end on Donald J. Trump.

If the defeated army of mainstream media is being a little quiet right now, those of us who greeted Trump’s victory with jubilation are not. For patriots and populists, Trump’s 2nd term comes as something of a miracle, an event which not just Trump but which many others perceive as the working out of some divine contract between God and America. Even as an atheist I find it possible to marvel at the sheer unlikely survival of Trump and MAGA after so many years of so much power being determined to bury them, both literally as well as figuratively. Surviving an assasination attempt by millimetres was the kind of thing that would occur if one really was touched by destiny or held within the promise of a divine providence. Much as my fellow atheists sneer at this kind of thinking, it has a powerful influence still, and part of Trump’s mythic importance and symbolic significance beyond America’s shores derives from the sheer scale of the attempts to demonise, discredit, deny and destroy him.

That Trump survived the stolen election, the betrayals from within, the most sustained campaign of vitriolic dishonesty in media history, the rival contenders, the fury of the Democrat base, the concerted efforts of the entertainment industry, the errors he made during COVID when influenced by his enemies, the assasination attempts, the lawfare and the gross corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI, confers upon him a status that no other modern politician or figure can equal. It is this tale of resistance and triumph against all the odds that follows the trajectory of the Hero’s Journey, and it is a supreme irony that the efforts to remove him from politics have, as much as his own actions and policy choices, conferred this legendary status on him.

If they had been a little less insane in their efforts against him, much of the meaning of a 2nd term and of Trump personally, especially outside America, would not exist.

But thanks to the criminality, corruption, sheer malice and extreme behaviour of the attempt to first remove Trump from office and then prevent him ever getting back, the full exposure of just how insane our ruling class is combined with Trump managing to overcome them does something his haters and opponents never intended. It ensured that he came to represent far more than himself, and even far more than the idea of returning America to greatness or returning patriotic nationalism to the core of policy in one particular nation.

Trump, this inauguration and this second term now represent so much more than that. They represent the triumph of the spirit of Man and Nation against a system that values neither. They represent the fact that we can win, not just Trump himself. For decades the drift of the West has been towards its own destruction, and the purpose of our political system has been to exclude us, ordinary patriots, from having a say. Trump showed us that things do not have to keep getting worse. Trump showed that media lies will not and should not determine our views or the policies enacted by our nations. Trump showed us that there were people who would listen to those who were ignored, represent those who had no representation, and deliver us from the smug evils of a political and media class who had ruled us for decades without ever having a shred of respect for the things we cherish and the values we hold.

Trump’s unlikely 2nd term triumph is like all heroic stories about the overcoming of impossible odds and the fight against entrenched and powerful evils. It is not the fake and confected hope of slogans like Equality, Diversity and Change. It was not built on a pretence of compassion by psychopaths who feel nothing but hatred for their own citizens. It wasn’t a big smile and a claim of inalienable rights plastered over perpetual wars and the abortion industry. It was a genuine change, a genuine alternative, an idea that those who should own their nation can reclaim it, that We the People are not chattel and slaves to be bled dry by taxes and spending bills and future debts while a ruling class lavishes gifts on themselves, their friends and their foreign masters. It is a story of the majority who had become outsiders in their own lands, a majority ignored by those who ruled them, or even worse, imprisoned for sensible views. Trump became the symbol of resisting and BEATING the utter corruption of the political and media establishment. He became the idea that the working class can win, the idea that a nation can put its own people first, the idea that all the concerted power of the biggest companies, donors, media organisations and unelected bureaucracies can be defied and can be overcome.

As Globalist regimes made an increasing mockery of the label Free World, as Globalist politicians siphoned trillions to their pet wars and pet causes without the faintest consideration of populations at home, as Globalist media organisations descended into depths of propaganda that would make Soviets blush, MAGA and Trumpism showed that we can hope and dream that the grip of these bastards on our throat and the rule of these bastards in our lands can be broken.

Today I read the most media indoctrinated comments from fellow Brits who, like me, know that Trump matters. But those Brits are not like this Brit. I read some of them saying that they are afraid because Trump is in power again, just as they were afraid of a pandemic but not of the people who created it or the people who pretended that taking away liberty and injecting experiments was a safer option. The people afraid of Trump are the people afraid of life. They are the people who think that the planet is dying. They are the people who think that the most innocent life in the womb is disposable and meaningless. They are the people who think that we should be more afraid to be called racist than we are disgusted by the rape of children. They are the people who do not like their nation, their fellow citizens, their own history, their own culture, or even their species very much.

For decades the ordinary citizen has been held hostage by the imaginary and programmed fears of those who listen to a corrupt media. For decades we have suffered real threats while imaginary ones took up all the money and all the time of those above us. We have had to live in the world shaped by both their corruption and their hysteria.

The meaning of Trump’s inauguration is that we do not have to live like that. Wherever we are in the western world, it can be reclaimed. Wherever we are, we can aspire to greatness instead of either managed decline or deliberate destruction or unending betrayal. We can laugh at their fears, and have faith in our hopes.

It is possible to be better, to be bolder, to return to sanity without bowing to the screams of the maddest and most programmed among us. Whether the 2nd term delivers or not, the message is there that we should not forget.

Those who control almost everything, don’t control your fate if you choose to fight back. Those who have destroyed almost everything can be opposed. Those who fear life can be beaten by those who love life and want to pursue happiness without the State telling you what you are allowed to think and feel. While a certain class of person trembles with fear, we, for the first time in a long time, can walk with our heads held high.

It’s not just Trump or America that is back. It’s hope, too.