“Nothing will stand in our way.”
With that six-word vow, President Trump described how he planned to make his second term in office differ from his first. Now, after a four-year interregnum that began with political exile and ended with his improbable resurrection, the great disrupter made clear that he does not intend to be thwarted this time in making America far more conservative at home and more imperial abroad.
In his 29-minute inaugural address, Mr. Trump wasted no time on lofty appeals to American ideals. Instead, he spoke with a tone of aggression intended to be heard by domestic and foreign audiences as a warning that America under a more experienced Donald Trump will not take no for an answer.
He will end an era in which the world exploited American generosity, he said, empowering an “External Revenue Service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
After falsely declaring that China controls the American-built Panama Canal, he vowed, “We’re taking it back.” He hailed a presidential predecessor: not Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, but William McKinley, the tariff-loving 25th president, who engaged in the Spanish-American War, seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico and paved the way for that canal.
And in the best McKinley spirit, he reinvigorated the idea of an America that will “pursue our manifest destiny,” a rallying call of the 1890s. This time, though, he described that destiny as an American settlement on Mars — a declaration that brought a thumbs up from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who founded SpaceX with that goal in mind, and who has barely left the president’s side since Election Day.