Donald Trump sworn in as 47th President of the United States

Anna Chen – Monday 20th January 2025, President Donald Trump

Hi. How’s your weekend been? Here’s how mine went.

Monday, 20 January 2025: You could smell the avarice in the company of wolves on the podium at the Capitol Rotunda today. I’m surprised the Tech Bros weren’t openly salivating. Glittery eyes anticipated a feast as Trump threw them bone, meat, fillet mignon: the whole carcass.

A 20,000-strong audience watched the Don sworn in at 17:02GMT in a ceremony reminiscent of Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome. They listened to his MAGA speech like it was the Second Coming, rewarding him with non-stop standing ovations in the Adoration of the Ham. The Silicon Valley elite bunched up on the podium on the left. Former presidents fading away on the right. The Oligarchy had arrived.

A slice of the world shuddered. 

Trump says God saved him from the assassin’s bullet to Make America Great Again. 

A slice of the world started drinking.

Some might read his aims for the nation to be “proud, prosperous and free” as screaming out his own personal needs: to be respected, grow even more filthily rich and continue to evade prison. Less so as a declaration of selfless good-will towards his fellow human beings we have grown to expect from Donald.

“America will be greater, stronger, more exceptional than ever before.” No longer to be bitch-slapped like the librul wussy living in his head at very expensive rental but which few of us have ever seen. “I will have my revenge,” he almost growled like the pantomime villain role models beloved by Masters of the Universe in the declining hegemon.

So how is Donald Trump to achieve his presidential nirvana?

First, every demagogue knows you need scapegoats for an inflation-stricken economy as you move fast and break stuff. Hundreds of immigrants without the necessary paperwork are said to have been rounded up for deportation even before he signs the Trump tower of presidential orders. These include declaring a state of national emergency at the southern border.

“Millions and millions” more will be expelled with the end of the current “Catch and Release” policy. That’s going to leave a lot of crops unharvested and homes left to clean themselves.

To add drama to the tragedy, the US army is being sent to the Mexican border to repel the “disastrous invasion of our country”. And the cartels are now designated as foreign terrorist organisations. Ooh, someone wants a ruck. 

“The full and immense power” of federal and state law enforcement will be used under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “eliminate” the presence of all gangs and foreign criminal networks from US soil, cities and inner cities. I’m Commander in Chief, I’m going to defend you from the Enemy as defined by me, with full force “at a level nobody’s ever seen before”.

According to Donald, record inflation was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and he’s telling his minions to defeat it. Who knows how? A reminder that inflation was kept low before his wrecking-ball policies of trade war on China, the world’s factory, and the Trump Pump ended the economic stability brought about by China’s intervention after America’s disastrous Great Crash of 2008. Not that Biden did much better with his war expenses.

Declaring an energy emergency, Trump reiterated his promise to “Drill, baby, drill.” America will have the largest amount of gas and oil of any country on Earth (watch out, Venezuela) and he will export it all over the world.

He’d forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson to rip out £billions of Huawei 5G infrastructure we’d already paid for in 2020, despite GCHQ finding no problem. I guess this means our wind farms and solar renewables are next. Let’s see how steely Keir “I have the balls” Starmer is in resisting the order to self-harm all the way to the Stone Age.

Killing off Climate Change action, Donald Trump will end the Green New deal, revoking the Electric Vehicle mandate, focusing on US autoworkers to produce cars. He neglected to say if they’d be working for Chinese wages. And if not, who will afford to buy them?

He intends to tariff and tax foreign countries to “enrich our citizens”. Which sounds ominously like an extortion racket with menaces. A new External Revenue Service will collect all the wealth pouring in from foreign countries. Yeah, I bet it will. The implication is that China is expected to fund Trump’s renewed American Dream. Lord, this is so 18th century Empire building.

He will establish the Department of Government Efficiency, to be run by Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet whose government contracts are worth $10 billion. In true Orwellian fashion, this indicates the opposite is likely to take place. Will they all be keeping receipts? Perhaps Elon should rip up his little earner and save the government money.

All government censorship will end and free speech brought back to America. Fair and equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law. Law and order brought back to the cities. Race and gender considerations to be ditched in public and private life. It will be a colour blind and merit-based society. There are only two genders: male and female. 

Service members expelled from their jobs for defying vaccine mandates are to be reinstated with full back pay. Armed forces are to focus on defeating America’s “enemies”. Will build the strongest military the world has ever seen. Success will be measured by the battles won, wars ended and wars not begun. Trump’s legacy will be role of peacemaker and unifier. 

He implied that the Israeli hostage return, the day before he assumed office, was his achievement (shades of Reagan and Iran). Joe Biden and Kamala Harris applauded with frozen smiles and joined the standing ovation bouncing up and down like a Mexican wave. Talking of which, he’ll be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. And will be taking back the Panama Canal that he claims is operated by big boogie-man, China. 

America will be disease-free, practise manifest destiny, and will plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars. “Our Golden Age has just begun.” 

In other news, China’s Foreign office says it will allow ByteDance to make its own decisions regarding TikTok operations and acquisitions, reversing its previous decision to never sell.

Sunday 19 January 2025: The TikTok ban was due to start on Sunday. TikTok had changed 170 million American lives for the better over five years. Not only did it provide income streams, pulling many out of poverty in the richest country on the planet where people need two or even three jobs to survive. It also opened up relatively free communication where information was rapidly exchanged, raising the collective consciousness faster than at any time since Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. 

This lost the state its control over narratives such as Gaza. Israeli politicians feared a generational difference in political perceptions, rather than a left/right split. Their allies in the US called for a ban on the app, using the excuse that it is supposedly owned by China and was therefore a national security threat.

In fact, only 20 percent is owned by the two Chinese techs who founded it in 2017. Sixty percent is owned by foreign investors, 20 percent by TikTok workers (including 7,000 in the US) and the CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is Singaporean. 

In his first term as president, Donald Trump threatened a ban unless this highly profitable app was sold to an American entity. A bill, led by Republican Mike Gallagher who left politics early to work for Palantir, was signed by Joe Biden in 2024.

TikTok vigorously resisted sale of its valuable algorithm. 

However, in a sleight of hand, the app went dark a day before the ban was due to kick in and returned less than 24 hours later, only a day before Trump’s inauguration, possibly with a changed algorithm. Dissenting creators and content have been wiped off in the Night of the Delete Button. The Singaporean CEO is no longer named on his TikTok account as the CEO. He was invited to the inauguration.