Welcome to the inaugural déjà vu of President Donald Trump, to the Groundhog Days of his second term, to Trump 2: Back in the Habit. It doesn’t matter how you voted—Trump has been sworn in (potentially without actually touching the Bible?), and he’s already back on his bullshit: unsettling the climate (literally and figuratively), questioning the border (of the country, of his own power), increasing the tariffs, and, once again, offering so-called alternative facts on crowd sizes.
Battling subfreezing temperatures on the bluest Monday of the year, Joe and Jill welcomed Don and Mel back into the White House—Trump dressed as an expensive used-car salesman, Melania unreadable under an extremely large brim. (Perhaps she’s worried about her son’s birthright citizenship?) Michelle Obama couldn’t make it, but part-time painter George W. Bush had space in his diary (like all mischievous elves straight after Christmas), and the poor woman behind BFG Barron missed the whole event. The holy trinity of tech billionaires—Midlife Crisis Zuckerberg, Apple brat Tim Cook, and a Prime-delivered Jeff Bezos—sat front row like it was Fashion Week for influential oligarchs. And after two minutes of agonizingly awkward silence, Carrie Underwood sang “America the Beautiful” a cappella.
In his first 100 hours, rather than days, the 45th and 47th commander in chief moved with deliberate velocity, immediately pardoning 1,500 of the January 6 rioters, a clemency akin to Prince Harry and the British tabloids. He spoke of bringing back free speech, despite also initiating the TikTok ban that he then recently reversed. Under what Trump calls his dawning “golden age,” the US is renaming the Gulf of Mexico (Hillary Clinton’s reactionary cackle was heard across the Atlantic), going to war with Panama, and casually colonizing Mars. The White House’s diversity, equity, and inclusion employees have been put ominously on leave. And another of Trump’s alarming executive orders declares that only two sexes—male and female—will be recognized by the federal government, causing a bishop in a pulpit to literally ask Trump to have mercy.
And then Elon Musk, colead on Trump’s newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, came out on stage and did a Nazi salute. We all saw it with our own eyes—there is no 1984 revision of facts; there is no spin. It’s been claimed the one-armed gesture was a Roman salute—the same Roman salute used by Mussolini’s Fascist Party and later adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany. He did it. We saw it. It was joylessly memed across our feeds. For an ostensibly celebratory event, it was incredibly bloody bleak and a stark reminder of what the next four years could bring.
I don’t know how to round this all up. It’s discombobulating, finding myself pondering Nazi salutes mere hours into Trump 2. I guess the takeaway is that we should not underestimate the factions of the not-far-at-all-right that are being emboldened by Trump’s latest term. A group of people who want to limit diversity, who want to blame outsiders, who want abundant free speech within extremely narrow confines: man/woman, American/immigrant. Elon’s salute, and his audacity to believe that he’s now so influential and untouchable that he can mimic Nazis on a world stage without recompense, is simply a brazen embodiment of the America-first sentiment that voted Trump back into power. Buckle up.