Trump Puts His Presidency on Warp Speed

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 20, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s second inaugural address got a little repetitive in parts.

 

“The golden age of America begins right now,” he began. “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” Indeed, “our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free,” and a “thrilling new era of national success” is upon us. Trump will work with “purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, and safety,” and he’s already producing results. “National unity is now returning to America, and confidence is soaring like never before,” he said. “A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before,” he added. And although we “must be honest about the challenges we face,” they are surmountable. “From this moment on,” Trump declared, “America’s decline is over.”

 

Despite this barrage of redundant superlatives, Trump largely dispensed with the high-flown poetic rhetoric that so often adorns inaugural addresses and, sometimes, weighs them down. Instead, he opted for a more practical speech — a litany of to-do items. And the agenda is not exactly light.

 

Trump stressed the mandate he has to restore sanity to America’s immigration enforcement regime. In that pursuit, he will declare a “national emergency at our southern border,” put a halt to “all illegal entry” into the country, and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” In addition, he will designate Latin American drug cartels “foreign terrorist organizations” to eliminate the presence of “foreign gangs and networks” on U.S. soil.

 

On trade, Trump promised to “overhaul our trade system” and create a department of “external revenue” to account for the untold sums that will flow into the treasury from a schedule of tariffs targeting America’s allies. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he promised.

 

The president declared his intention to “revoke the electric vehicle mandate,” thereby “saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers.” Trump promised to make America “a manufacturing nation again (the U.S. is already the second-largest manufacturing nation in the world behind that of China), and he said that we “will be a rich nation again” as a result of his executive orders repealing Joe Biden’s restrictions on domestic energy exploration and production.

 

Trump pledged to pursue a variety of reforms to the U.S. military. Among them: reinstating with back pay enlisted personnel expelled from service for refusing a Covid vaccine, putting an end to social experimentation (e.g. “wokeness”) in the armed services, and restoring deterrence abroad — which will be measured “not only by the battles we win, but by the wars we end and, more importantly, the wars we never get into.” And Trump pledged to devote himself to the crises he accused Biden of overlooking. “Our country cannot deliver basic services as shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina who were treated so badly,” Trump lamented. “We will fix it!”

 

The president previewed a forthcoming showdown with the Panamanian government, which has “broken” a “promise to us” by charging “exorbitant prices and rates of passage” through the Canal Zone. “The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated,” he argued. “China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” He pledged to rename the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America,” and said a policy that “expands our territory” will not be limited to terrestrial bounds. “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars by launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump declared.

 

That’s a lot of priorities, some of which are more urgent than others. But Trump does have a mandate for change, broadly understood. In a fitting end to Joe Biden’s presidency, the outgoing Democrat was forced to sit through a scolding lecture about the extent to which he had failed the American people. His government presided over “a crisis of trust.” It was one that “cannot manage” domestic crises even as it “stumbled into” crises abroad, and it was shot through with members of the “radical establishment” who “extracted wealth” from this country while giving nothing back. Biden’s administration was typified by “many betrayals.” Trump’s administration, by contrast, will deliver.

 

Joe Biden, too, had a mandate — albeit one that was far narrower than his interpretation of it. It was that misapprehension that led Biden to overreach and, subsequently, fail. Voters seemed willing to absolve Biden of responsibility for the crisis he inherited — the pandemic — but they were not so charitable when it came to the pandemic’s downstream effects: inflation, social degradation, lawlessness, and the maturation of a generation struggling to make up lost ground.

 

Trump, too, may benefit from voters’ understanding that he has been tasked with cleaning up an impossible mess. They may not blame him if the ideal immigration regime he envisions doesn’t materialize immediately or if prices and wages do not achieve some tolerable equilibrium in short order. They will, however, withdraw their enthusiasm if Trump loses sight of these goals and dwells instead on his personal grievances or makes a fetish of things he didn’t even run for office on, like a program of American territorial expansionism.

 

Trump’s second inaugural address set a tone that could serve his administration well. It was a workmanlike speech, and that’s quite fitting for an administration charged with securing discrete, tangible objectives. The president can (and did) spend Inauguration Day reveling in his political comeback. Tomorrow, the work begins.