Back to a Maga future: Mr Trump's second coming signals more disruption

Although the tone was more measured in keeping with an indoor setting, Donald Trump’s second inauguration speech hewed to the pattern of his 2017 debut, reinforcing the “America First” agenda and signalling for the United States and the world that the 47th presidency is likely to be as disruptive as the 45th, if not more. Speaking at the rotunda of the Capitol, which his supporters had stormed on January 6, 2021, the overblown and often inaccurate rhetoric was pure “Make America Great Again (Maga)”, and his supporters rewarded him with repeated standing ovations.

 

Mr Trump earned the loudest and longest cheer for his intention, backed by an executive order, to declare a national emergency on the southern border, sending troops to deport illegal immigrants. The impact is already being felt with applicants discovering that appointments for interviews at the border were cancelled within minutes of Mr Trump being sworn in. He also took time to thank the Black and Hispanic communities for voting for him in larger numbers than in 2020 — a stinging message for the Democrats — even as the administration announced that it would be doing away with diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes, making good on Mr Trump’s declaration that his administration would be “colour blind” and “merit-based”. His attempt to end birth-right citizenship is part of this agenda, though experts suggest it is legally untenable.

 

No less consequential for a world facing an unprecedented rise in global temperatures is Mr Trump’s decision to end the Green New Deal and revoke an “electric vehicle mandate”. There is no such mandate, merely emission regulations, but the emphasis on fossil fuels is unmistakable. Connected to this is Mr Trump’s announcement to control inflation by lifting restrictions on the production of oil and gas — “drill, baby, drill” is how he expressed it — to lower energy prices. Lower global energy prices will help large importers like India. However, on the flipside, he followed up his isolationist playbook by exiting the Paris agreement on climate change again as well as the World Health Organization. Both will affect a developing country like India negatively. Mr Trump also repeated his early intentions to “tariff and tax other countries” to enrich US citizens and to set up an “external revenue service” to collect new tariffs, duties and revenues, raising the spectre of trade wars. This is again an area India will have to deal with carefully.

 

Well aware that he has made history as the first convicted felon to be sworn in as President, Mr Trump underlined the nature of his administration by granting clemency to all those charged in the Capitol attack four years ago. He justified his mandate by creating a standard dystopian picture of earlier administrations and projecting his accession to power as the beginning of a “Golden Age”, referencing a vision of American greatness harboured by a certain type of US citizen. If the speech set the tone, the choreography of the inauguration, held in the Capitol for the first time since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985, offered more indicators to the nature of the 47th presidency. Tech titans — Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chou — were allotted prime seating, mingling with the first family and ahead of Mr Trump’s Cabinet picks, a signal of the emerging nature of the incoming regime. Far from being “liberation day” as Mr Trump claimed, January 20, 2025, underlined the moment when the world’s most powerful nation will hold the world captive to more disorder and uncertainty again.