Buckle up. Here comes the chaos, the schoolyard insults and the midnight text messages. At noon today, the Trump show returns when Trump is sworn in for a return engagement as president.
There is no question what kind of storm is coming. Vice President Kamala Harris reminded voters of the havoc of Trump’s first four years as president by telling rallies that “we’re not going back — we can’t go back.”
Well, here we are. He’s back.
Today’s inauguration is confirmation of Trump’s domination of American politics since he entered politics as a presidential candidate in 2015.
With a political base built on his time as a reality television star, Trump has no rival as the master of American media. Even before his success on television, Trump controlled tabloid front pages as a master of gossip and outrage.
Now he is the singular titan of social media. The owners of major internet platforms Facebook and X will be in privileged seats for the swearing-in. They have donated millions to the inauguration to guard their king of and the so-called realm of “infotainment,” the combination of fake news, conspiracy theories and grievance that drives websites, podcasts and talk show stories.
Trump once called out TikTok as a Chinese threat to U.S. security. Now he is looking for ways to keep the company operating in the U.S. Trump is feasting on social media as he heads toward the ’26 midterms and the 2028 presidential race. He has no equal in national political profile. He has no clear successor, Republican or Democrat, in American politics. And he wants to keep it that way, with a chokehold on American media.
He has already erased the old Republican Party, defeated the Democrats and created a dominant populist movement bigger than the old parties with the magical, distracting and ever-changing promise to “Make America Great Again.”
Most of the people dazzled by his media magic did not go to college. They generally live in small towns and rural areas and states. Polls show they feel left behind by a high-tech, global economy. And many of them fear, they tell the polls, they are being replaced by cheap foreign labor overseas while attention and preference is given to America’s rising percentage of racial minorities and immigrants.
They are locked into Trump as their hero on television, podcasts and echo chamber websites. They are told by Trump to ignore fact-checkers and news reporters as the “enemy of the people.”
Obediently, they turn their eyes from facts unfavorable to Trump, beginning with his two impeachments during the first term.
Also, they still believe his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. They’ve been told the Trump-inspired effort to overthrow the government by stopping certification of the 2020 election was “a day of love.”
Somehow, Trump has convinced his faithful not to trust their eyes and to ignore evidence of assaults on police and the deaths of five people as a result of the assault. He claims none of his supporters had guns despite court evidence to the contrary.
His fans also have no time for the four criminal indictments that followed his first term in office. They ignored a conviction on 34 felony counts and a jury finding that he was liable for sexual abuse in a civil case.
They enjoy Trump’s promise to be “your retribution,” against the political establishment, against the courts that he claims have engaged in “lawfare” against him. In fact, at his rallies, it is a highlight of the live show when he denounces his political rivals as “vermin” and “enemies from within.”
Like a carnival barker, he promises his roaring fans at the rallies and on social media that he will give them vengeance against Democrats and also traditional Republicans who have refused to follow his orders, from former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to Mike Pence, his own former vice president.
And he has reduced Congressional Republicans to fearful sycophants anxious with concern that any rebuff of Trump will trigger his base of blindly obedient followers to target them for defeat in their next primary.
Already, to start his second term, he has nominated several unqualified people to his Cabinet with the apparent primary requirement that they are loyal to him and good-looking spokesmen for him on television.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) gave the game away last year when he said of the House Republican conference: “If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”
What will Trump’s loyalists do when Trump fails to tame the $36 trillion national debt? What will they say when there are no mass deportations?
President Biden warned in his farewell address against the rise of a tech-industrial complex spreading disinformation. Biden said: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation. … The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s famous words, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way today’s political winds are blowing. The Trump storm is always right there on social media.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
