This is what we can expect from Trump on his big day

The president-elect will not just be inaugurating a second term, but something like a reign of fear – more a case of ‘malice toward all with charity for none’. We can’t say we weren’t warned, argues Sean O’Grady

Given that we lived through the first one, we have a reasonably clear idea about what the second coming of Donald John Trump will be like: a recurring nightmare.

As the fashionable cliche goes, “We’ve seen this movie before” – literally, in my case. Pondering what President Trump has in store for us on inauguration day, I took the trouble to watch the address he delivered on 20 January 2017...

After everything that has transpired during the intervening eight years, it actually seems pretty tame by Trumpian standards. There was even a reference – ironic, given Trump’s attempted coup and boycott of Biden’s inauguration in 2021 – to the democratic tradition: “Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent.”

His speech comes after a lot of self-congratulatory preparatory words from various dignitaries about how remarkable it is that something so miraculous in human history – the peaceful, dignified, seamless, democratic transfer of power – had become so routine and taken for granted.

It was George Washington who said that the first such ceremonial, in 1801, was the most significant because it established the precedent that has stood the test of time. America did not, as some feared, fall into the ways of absolutist monarchies. Little did we realise then that the man taking the oath of office some 216 years later was to try and prove otherwise.

But much of Trump’s language in 2017 was an all-too-reliable precursor to what followed. “America First”, so redolent of the fascist movement of the 1930s, was proclaimed as the “new vision”: “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

Despite the odd ritualistic reference to “healing”, the Trumpian theme then, as it will surely be again, was division. Division, that is, between Americans at home, the Maga movement and some tiny elite consorting against them, and between America and its allies: “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength … Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”

Observers will find much to fear and little to inspire in this speech, with no quotes for the ages (Getty)

Just as he had in the 2016 campaign, and again in 2020 and 2024, he sought to set “us” against “them”, and that means protectionism, nativism and isolationism. “America First” is a zero-sum doctrine, like tariffs and protectionism, which precludes the notion that both sides of any given relationship can prosper from a deal or an alliance. It is, indeed, the mentality of the property developer rather than the statesman.

This time round, then, more of the same, but with some new emphases. Unless he is really in the mood, he probably won’t go off on one of his semi-conversational rambles but there will be disturbing declarations about deportations (a Maga priority), punitive tariffs and the territorial expansion of the United States to be secured by military or economic coercion. Active hostility towards nations that are supposed to be allies and friends will be set as American policy as never before. Trump, in other words, has an undimmed capacity to shock, as well as to brag and distort reality to guard an oversized and brittle ego.

Observers will, then, find much to fear and little to inspire in this speech, with no quotes for the ages. You simply cannot imagine him emulating the most celebrated phrase-making from the past.

It would be appropriate (but inconceivable) for this to say anything like Abraham Lincoln’s appeal, to a broken union in 1865: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Trump isn’t the type, as Lincoln was, to ask mankind to listen to its “better angels”.

Nor might we expect Trump to tell us that America “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of Liberty”, as President Kennedy did. From what we know of his life and career, The Donald would also be ill-placed to tell anyone to: “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”

And as for Franklin Roosevelt’s invocation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, well, Trump lives and thrives by stirring up baseless fears among the followers he so cynically exploits.

So there will be no surprises, at least not on the upside. You may recall that Trump, half-joking, said he’d like to be a “dictator” on day one of returning to power. It will be like that. Trump has already promised “major” presidential pardons, and that he’ll free the January 6 violent insurrectionists in his first hour in office, thus desecrating, once again, his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States” in record time.

He’ll pull out of the Paris climate accords, again, and he’ll set in motion one of his most chilling pledges: “To those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there, I will be your retribution.”

The justice department and the entire machinery of federal government will be abused in the pursuit of Trump’s interests and, as convenient to them, the oligarchy that surrounds and supports him. He will not just be inaugurating a second term but something like a reign of fear – more a case of “malice toward all with charity for none”. We can’t say we weren’t warned.