Trump proclaims a golden age for America
An open-minded take on the January 20, 2025, Inaugural Address
Peter Baker, in a skewed interpretation of Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, published in The New York Times website shortly after the address, writes that Mr. Trump “largely dispensed with lofty themes and the broad unifying strokes favored by most presidents in their Inaugural Addresses.” Baker’s interpretation would truly astonish us, if it were not for the fact that we are accustomed to one-sided and negative interpretations of Donald Trump by the major U.S. media. For readers who have not read a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, but who would like nonetheless to be connected to the real, I can inform you that Trump in his January 20 Inaugural Address put forth a vision of a prosperous nation, with its people united across differences of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and region; a nation again respected throughout the world; a nation whose people once again have faith in their democracy.
Trump began his Inaugural Address with visionary words.
The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first.
Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free. America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before.
I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. 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.
The President expressed the hope that the MAGA movement is forging the unity of the nation.
It is my hope that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country. As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda, with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society: young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban, suburban, rural, and very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote we won by millions of people. To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote.
He promised that the Trump administration will be committed to making America great again, not merely for some, but for all. “Under our administration of American patriots, we will be working to meet every crisis with dignity and power and strength. We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed”.
Trump outlined his plan to overcome what he presented as an inflation crisis caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices. To address overspending, the Trump administration will establish a new Department of Government Efficiency to restore the effectiveness of the federal government; and it will establish an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs, duties, and revenues related to trade with other countries. To lower energy prices, Trump will declare a national energy emergency in order to expand production of oil and natural gas. This will mean the renewal of American manufacturing, which now will be able to take advantage of the nation’s extensive oil and gas reserves. The administration, Trump declares, will revoke the Green New Deal, with its unnecessary restrictions ostensibly designed to protect the environment. In particular, Trump expressed his vision of renewing the American auto industry, in accordance with his “sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers”, through the greater production of oil and the revocation of the electric vehicle mandate, which is provoking higher prices for the gas-powered vehicles that consumers prefer.
Trump’s economic plan has the expected opposition of the advocates of green policies. However, ecologists in the West have made a historic error by presenting the issue in unidimensional terms. The turn to green energy and green production and consumption has to be integrated into a comprehensive economic plan for the development of the productive forces of the nation, as is being demonstrated by several emerging nations of the Global South and East. You cannot turn away from fossil fuels until the structures of green energy and green production and consumption are in place, and inattention to these dialectically opposed tendencies is inconsistent with common-sense intelligence and is fatal for popular support.
The auto industry, at one time the most advanced in the world and a symbol of American technological achievement, is central to Trump’s vision of making America great again. In his inaugural address, Trump expressed a vision of a nation that is capable of expanding and growing, fed by the exploring and innovative spirit of its people. He declared:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.
Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation. And right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close.
Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve. . ..
Our country was forged and built by the generations of patriots who gave everything they had for our rights and for our freedom. They were farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steel workers and coal miners, police officers and pioneers who pushed onward, marched forward and let no obstacle defeat their spirit or their pride.
Together they laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, built great highways, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and triumphed over every single challenge that they faced.
It is of course the case that Trump, in this uplifting discourse, overlooks the role of the conquest of the indigenous peoples in the forging of a powerful nation in North America, just as he overlooks the strategic insertion of the growing American economy in the global economic structures established by the four-century-long Western European conquest of what we today call the Global South. But this oversight is not reason for dismissal of the MAGA project. Rather, it is reason for a critique of the MAGA program, a critique that supports its great vision of American renewal, but seeks to increase its awareness of surviving structures from the era of European colonialism, the transformation of which is necessary for the attainment of MAGA’s goals of American prosperity and world peace.
Donald Trump expressed his hope that his legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.
Like in 2017, we will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.
My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier. I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families.
As I have previously written, the MAGA movement must move beyond its most admirable orientation to peace; it must move toward a consistent anti-imperialism. Because commitment to the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of the nations of the world would be the best preventive check on the American tendency to enter costly wars that never attain their goals. And because mutually beneficial trade among the nations of the world is the best way to create a global environment that will support and sustain American hopes for the expansion of its economy. The cooperation of the United States with the nations of the Global South and East in the construction of a world defined by respect for the sovereignty of all nations and by mutually beneficial commerce is the surest road to peace and prosperity for all. The MAGA movement is taking important steps in this direction, but it must go further, finding a path toward a consistent anti-imperialism in foreign policy. (See “A critique of MAGA from real socialism: Economic nationalism as constructive cooperation with the world”, December 27, 2024).
Trump invoked the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and he committed to making King’s dream a reality. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based”. Trump here is likely referring to Dr. King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. But King evolved considerably in his understanding following that famous speech, an evolution that was driven by his discernment of the lack of support among whites for a second stage of the civil rights movement, which he defined as dedicated to economic justice of all citizens, regardless of race. Nevertheless, even the more mature King of 1967 and 1968 did not lose faith in the redemption of the soul of America. Depending on how the MAGA movement evolves, it may turn out that MAGA and Dr. King are on the same page. (See “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Economic justice for all, in the nation and the world”, January 20, 2025).
Further considerations
As I conclude in my January 17 commentary, “MAGA and the working class”, the MAGA movement has a fundamental legitimacy, in that it is rooted in the working class and in middle America. It has attained an understanding of the unsustainability of endless wars and imperialist overreach, adopting the slogan “peace through strength,” which advocates a strong military that functions primarily as a deterrent and not as a force that intervenes everywhere. We must seek to educate the MAGA movement toward a consistent anti-imperialism, in which it arrives to understand that the strengthening of the productive capacities of the nation can only be fully attained through cooperation and mutually beneficial trade with all the nations and regions of the world, as is persistently proclaimed by the leading socialist, progressive, and anti-imperialist states of the world. The gains and setbacks of the MAGA movement likely will provide key opportunities for fulfilling the necessary role of elevating anti-imperialist consciousness in the MAGA movement.
On January 20, Trump emitted an executive order that revokes seventy-eight Biden administration executive actions, orders and presidential memoranda. Among them was the Revocation of Presidential Memorandum of January 14, 2025, which rescinded the designation of Cuba as a state-sponsor of terrorism, emitted by Biden at the end of his presidency, perhaps anticipating a reversal by Trump. Trump’s January 20 action reactivates a designation that should never have been, an entirely false claim that functions as a key dimension of the U.S. unjustifiable unconventional war against Cuba.
We should try to keep in mind, however, that Trump’s revocation is a miniscule dimension of the battle of pardons and executive orders between Trump and Biden. The MAGA movement has not yet formulated a policy with respect to Cuba and Latin America for the current stage of the movement.
During the next four years, political analysts should assess the extent to which the second Trump administration promotes the long-term interests of the nation and the people, basing their analyses on careful empirical observation, and not outdated ideological conceptions, distortions, and prejudices, or catastrophic expectations.
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