At Donald Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, it rained, it rained during the president’s speech. And I know it well, because the moment he started speaking and there was no longer an opportunity to do live interviews with his followers, I took out my notebook and started taking notes of his words. The drops began to fall on my hands and on the paper, smearing the ink of what I wrote. In the afternoon, just before the formal dance with which the majestic day ends, he said without breaking a sweat: “The rain didn’t come, we finished the speech, we went inside, then it fell a little and then we went out again.”
It had rained, word of honor. People had put on their raincoats, I had those pages of mine with the letters blurred by the water, all of us who were there had seen it and half the planet had been able to see it on television. It had rained and he denied it without blushing. The era of “alternative facts” had just begun.
Memories of that day—and of so many subsequent days—come flooding back this Monday, January 20, 2025, as Trump is sworn into office for the second time (indoors, inside the Capitol, this time). At one point he says that he is going to end “the electric car mandate,” that from now on every American will be able to “buy the car they want.” There is no order that requires the purchase of any electric car, much less one that does not allow citizens to buy the vehicle they really want. Was it so important that the president lied absurdly and blatantly about the rain that half the planet had seen? Is it so serious that this Monday he told the lie about electric cars?
It all seems like a joke, a prank. At another moment he says that he is going to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, Hillary Clinton hangs her head and is unable to hold back her laughter. What is going through the head of that woman, who lost the 2016 elections to Trump, despite surpassing him by three million votes and is now attending her second inauguration. Near her, Elon Musk seems radiant, he must not be very serious about electric cars if the founder of Tesla seems on cloud nine. When Trump assures that the US flag will fly sooner rather than later on Mars, he is the one who laughs. He has also talked about recovering the Panama Canal.
The examples and symbols change, but not the discourse, the one that paints the United States as a disrespected and weak country that will be great again, where law and order will return, from which no one else will benefit. A country in which children will no longer be taught to hate their nation, as seems to be happening now.
Neither Trump nor anything he says has changed in essence, what has changed is the world. Ultra movements have spread in Europe, large technology companies have gone from resistance to pragmatic worship, Musk has become the owner of X, the former Twitter that expelled the now president. And little or nothing remains of Abraham Lincoln’s old Republican Party. The so-called cultural war is being won by a landslide. And Wall Street is up to its numbers: with the deregulation, tax cuts and peace agreements that are presumed, the economy will do like a shot.
If Trump’s second term instills more fear, it is because of everything that now surrounds him. It is not healthy to normalize a president to lie in front of the world, nor is it sensible for him to return to government after having incited a civil rebellion against his rival’s victory. There has been a moment when he mentions Martin Luther King, but we all know that today we would call Martin Luther King woke up And he didn’t die from the flu.
