They Gave Trump the Center, and He Took It

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

 

Donald Trump stood at the center of American politics — in both senses — when he was inaugurated in the U.S. Capitol on Monday afternoon.

 

Pretty much everything of import in national affairs will revolve around Trump for the foreseeable future, and he’s managed, in many respects, to occupy the political and cultural center.

 

Trump’s critics have long insisted that he be shunned and not “normalized.” Did someone tell Carrie Underwood, who performed “America the Beautiful” at the inauguration (spontaneously going a cappella when there was a snafu with the accompanying music)? Or the richest, most successful entrepreneurs in the country, who were on prominent display? Or, for the matter, did someone tell the Village People?

 

If someone had predicted that the group formed to appeal to gay disco fans in 1977 would, in the year of our lord 2025, be performing at a pre-inaugural rally for a Republican president-elect considered a troglodyte culture warrior by his enemies, he’d have been justifiably mocked and dismissed.

 

As it turns out, disco was never dead, it was just waiting for Trump to revive it (actually, disco-inspired music was already on the upswing before Trump came up with his trendy Y.M.C.A. dance).

 

How did a Democratic Party that has long prided itself on its hipness and future-oriented attitude lose a coolness fight to Donald J. Trump?

 

Well, for one thing, the party’s primary voters renominated an octogenarian who couldn’t identify or align himself with a cultural trend if he were gently directed to it by a bevy of solicitous aides. He was then swapped out for his unimpressive vice president, who was the beneficiary of a manufactured campaign to make her seem fun and interesting that collapsed of its own weight by November.

 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had to sit awkwardly and listen in the Capitol as Trump excoriated their governing record. The harshness of his critique has led some observers to deride his inaugural address as American Carnage 2.0, a reference to the famous phrase from his first inaugural. If Trump was unsparing in his description of the status quo, though, he was soaring in his promises of “a thrilling new era of national success.”

 

He talked of bringing a “revolution of common sense,” positioning that wouldn’t be so easily available to him if the other side hadn’t ceded so much ground.

 

Trump’s urgency about securing the border wouldn’t have nearly the same political salience if Biden hadn’t been so heedless about a record-breaking influx of illegal immigrants.

 

Trump wouldn’t get to speak of defeating “record inflation” if there hadn’t been record inflation in the first place.

 

Trump’s decision to make it official government policy to recognize only two genders would be irrelevant if the Democrats hadn’t hitched themselves to gender insanity.

 

Trump’s call for ending the efforts to insinuate race and gender into all aspects of American life would be meaningless if DEI hadn’t become Democratic gospel.

 

The Democrats appeared to believe that it didn’t matter how out of touch and radical they’d become, so long as they were running against a Donald Trump who could be ruled out of bounds. But if the public concluded that Trump made more sense than his adversaries, a campaign to render him ipso facto unacceptable was going to fail.

 

This is not to say that Trump is an anodyne centrist. His zeal for tariffs, his revisionist views of January 6 (unmentioned in his address), and his apparent determination to retake the Panama Canal are hardly consensus positions. No matter how much momentum Trump has now, controversies will pile up and events will take a hand. The current goodwill could prove quite transitory.

 

Still, it was Trump who was the focus of all the attention on Monday, Trump who is setting the agenda, and Trump who can plausibly define himself as closer to the middle than his opponents — and they brought it on themselves.