Four years? Trump struggles through the first hour. | Will Bunch Newsletter

I woke up this morning at 4 a.m., as I do almost every Tuesday to bring you this weekly newsletter, with the half-awake realization that I’ve now survived 66 years on Planet Earth. But just barely, it seems, after spending six straight hours on my senior-citizen-discount feet in downtown Washington under soaking rain and a snow shower. All this on the first full day of another Donald Trump presidency. It’s going to be a great year.

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With apologies to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, I was somewhere around Largo, on the edge of the I-95 Capital Beltway, when Trump began to take hold. It was noon on Jan. 20, 2025 — the moment of presidential transition as spelled out in the 20th Amendment, if any of that stuff still matters. But now I was speeding away from Washington and a 24-hour sojourn that was cut a little short mainly because of a bum foot that made the psychic pain feel all too real.

By the time I got to Delaware, the 47th president of the United States had finished his weirdly personal and political inaugural address and moved downstairs to the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall for the the B-list dignitaries who weren’t on the Musk-scented VIP guest list for the Rotunda ceremony. And he was already unraveling.

The late Gov. Mario Cuomo famously said that “you campaign in poetry... [and] govern in prose,” but Trump was speaking in gibberish, and it was barely 1 p.m. He took his time checking off his list of grievances and grudges that his aides successfully kept out of his main speech, like calling his critic the ex-Rep. Liz Cheney “a crying lunatic.” But the words — the ones that weren’t slurred — came out in a singsong monotone. And then he spotted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the audience, and went off on what seemed like an endless riff on border-wall design and technology.

“We had a fence structure that they worked on — we worked on, the governor worked on it with me — and I didn’t love it, to be honest. I wanted a nice, pre-cast concrete, like 40, 50 feet high. It could have been a ‘T’ shape or a ‘Y’ shape. I love construction...” This kind of talk went on for four minutes and 45 seconds, with riffs on steel rebar and anti-climb panels and with Vice President JD Vance standing behind him with a pained, constipated expression, occasionally forcing a laugh. Vance looked like a modern-day Ed McMahon as sidekick to a Carnac the Magnificent who’s rapidly losing his powers of cognition, let alone precognition.

Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Inaugural Ceremony Committee, set the tone for one of most consequential yet strangest days in American history when she told the Rotunda crowd: “Our theme this year is our enduring democracy ... the presence of so many presidents and vice presidents here today is truly a testament to that endurance.” She blew right past the point that the man of honor has recently been convicted of 34 felony counts in one election-interference case and criminally indicted in two others.

It was like this all through America’s 74th presidential inauguration, as marching bands and chaplains and even some TV pundits tried to hail a return to normalcy after the tortured events of January 2021 that clearly just wasn’t happening, especially whenever the mush-mouthed Trump and his Festivus list of grievances grabbed the mic. But a beaten-down news media continued to gloriously describe this incoherent emperor’s fantastic new clothes, in coverage that CNN critic Oliver Darcy described as an “invasion of the body snatchers.”

By sundown, the leader of the seditious and violent Proud Boys — Enrique Tarrio, serving 22 years for his role in that January insurrection — was walking out of his cell, granted clemency by Trump. Other Proud Boys marched through the streets of D.C. Monday on their way to another rally at the Capital One Arena, where Trump’s co-president and world’s richest person Elon Musk hailed the throng with not one but two gestures that even the cautious New York Times compared to a fascist, or Nazi, salute.

Musk’s seeming Hitler invocation felt like a moment of stinging clarity about the real Day One, when a president could brag about “the wars we never get into” a few minutes before bellowing imperialistic threats against the Panama Canal, that “we’re taking it back!”

His inaugural address from the Rotunda was long, monotonous, too partisan and crude, replacing the tradition of lofty ideals about freedom and world peace with the naked greed of “drill, baby, drill.” But its deadliest sin was its raging narcissism, rewriting the 1961 outdoor poetry of John F. Kennedy to beseech America to ask not for their country can do for them, but to ask what they and their country can do for Donald John Trump.

The pettiness that knows no bounds peaked about 90 minutes later when Trump signed an executive order mandating that American flags be raised to full mast on Inauguration Day, so miffed was the new king that the national mourning period for the late Jimmy Carter had messed with his coronation mojo.

Or maybe Trump just hated one more comparison to the best people of our dying democracy.

It’s almost too easy a layup for an opinion columnist to note the tragic irony of the Constitutionally mandated train wreck that all of this happened on the national holiday to honor the life and the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Unlike the ever-complaining Trump, MLK actually went to jail or was booked 29 times, and did so for the morality he believed in, not for paying off porn stars or fomenting coups.

Which was the greater insult to our country’s greatest civil rights leader: the bizarre and over-the-top mimicry of King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech by the pro-Trump Detroit minister Lorenzo Sewell — who then used the publicity to launch his own meme coin, $Lorenzo, in hopes of raising billions like his billionaire hero? Or Trump offering America an utterly empty and insincere promise that he would make King’s dream come true, even as the rollback of diversity programs and the sight of billionaire capitalists like Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos watching democracy die from the front row would have horrified MLK?

The hours that followed brought what Team Trump called “shock and awe,” but it was only shocking if you ignored the 2024 campaign, as Trump — arguably fulfilling his vow to be a dictator on Day One — unleashed a flurry of executive dictates. These included massive rollbacks of four years of progress against climate change, a “national emergency” that would allow the president to send troops to the southern border, an all-out assault on the transgender community, and more than 1,000 pardons or commutations for the violent insurrections of Jan. 6, 2021 — even those who assaulted and wounded police officers.

The coming days — also likely to include the launch of a national mass deportation program, probably in Chicago — will show how consequential this January blizzard of Oval Office paperwork truly is. For now, though, my biggest takeaway from a day that some have anticipated and many have dreaded for the last four years is seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.

The endless monologue about border-wall building materials that came one hour into a term that has 35,040 more hours to go ought to be a warning, wrapped as it was in paranoid lies about the House Jan. 6 Committee and angry threats of retribution against his perceived enemies like Cheney and retired Gen. Mark Milley.

We’ve just flipped the car keys of this 248-year-old republic to a grandpa who starts his four-year road trip already in a serious state of mental decline, with all the guardrails of yesteryear stripped away by a corrupt Supreme Court, a feckless and increasingly useless Democratic Party, and a bended-knee elite media. And did I mention that there’s a nuclear bomb in the trunk? Fasten your seatbelts, America.

Question: If Trump raised all that money for his inauguration but then it was mostly canceled... where did that money go? — Stephanie King (@stephstephking.bsky.social)

Answer: You just asked one of the biggest questions on my mind right now! We know that Trump used his autocratic aura to get obey-in-advance CEOs from virtually all of Big Tech, the Detroit auto world, and elsewhere to fork over an unprecedented $250 million. And we can guess that it maybe cost $1 million, roughly, to rent and open the Capital One Arena for two days of events. That only leaves $249 million or so unaccounted for. We’ll get a few answers, but not all the ones we want, in a few months when the inaugural committee files a mandated report. The rest? I promise I will stay on this, even if no one else does.

Back in the “before times” of Jan. 7, I asked you about Trump’s cabinet picks. We now know that GOP senators apparently don’t care what we or any of America thinks, as they race to approve all of them, including hard-drinking, alleged woman-abusing Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. Readers seem appalled, like me, at many of the picks — especially Trump sycophant Kash Patel to run the FBI. Rosalind Holtzman called Patel an “arsonist with a can of gasoline, ready to accuse anyone and everyone for flinging the match that came from his fingers.” Michael Fehr chose a deep cut: Russell Vought at Office of Management and Budget, arguing that he “has a personal agenda to establish a Christofascist state, unlike the mainly vindictive and grift motivations of many other nominees.”

📮 This week’s question: Trump did many things as a dictator on Day One, from pulling out of the Paris climate accords to pardoning Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists. Which action will history see as most consequential, and why? Please email me your answer and “Trump Day One” in the subject line.

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