Trump is back in the White House and the billionaires are in the Rotunda

Well, folks, it’s happened. Donald Trump’s second inauguration week has passed, and in true Trumpian style, the occasion was as fascinating as it was bizarre.

If the first inauguration was a cacophony of misplaced grandeur, overblown self-congratulation, and a speech about "American carnage," the second is like a reboot of a terrible movie: somehow shinier, with even more dystopian undertones, but soulless.

Let’s start with the surface similarities. The self-aggrandisement remains intact. Trump proclaimed that he’d been divinely saved to “Make America great again.” The far-right weirdos are still buzzing around like moths to a particularly loud and orange flame, hoping to bask in his reflected power. There were industrial qualities of bullshit spouted that went largely unchallenged by journalists. On this level, everything feels oddly familiar.

Billionaires in the Rotunda. MAGA in the cold

But scratch a little deeper, and you’ll see that Trump 2.0 isn’t quite the sequel MAGA diehards were hoping for. There is less talk about reclaiming America from the billionaire class and more talk about making the whole country powerful and respected, which means its billionaires - Trump amongst them - will also be respected.

Back in 2017, there were at least murmurs of reclaiming America from the grip of the uber-wealthy. This time, the uber-wealthy are in the building. In fact, they’re in the Rotunda. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Vivek Ramaswamy all cozied up for front-row seats, rubbing shoulders with their favorite populist-in-chief. Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful, those blue-collar champions of Trump’s “forgotten America” were outside, freezing in the January cold, unable to even glimpse their man speaking.

This isn’t the “American carnage” Trump decried eight years ago; it’s American collusion. The billionaires have swapped their high-tech thrones for something more traditional: a cozy seat of power right next to the president.

The tech bros’ new masculine energy

Let’s be clear, this isn’t just Trump embracing tech billionaires. It’s the billionaires embracing Trump, and more importantly, what Trump can do for them. Take Musk. He’s not just here to throw Twitter tantrums about free speech anymore. He’s here to ensure the government clears the way for his companies to blast through red tape.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has been undergoing a transformation so dramatic it deserves its own “Rocky” montage. He’s taken up martial arts, dropped the awkward tech-nerd vibe, and rebranded himself as a right-friendly, bro type.

Zuck even appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to champion the need for more “masculine energy” in American business, which is playing into the right-wing narrative that the world, and the workplace, has become feminised through the dark alliance of cultural studies academics and middle-aged women who work in HR. This is holding back the men of the world from reaching their potential.

Burning down the longhouse

Just Google “longhouse” if you want to see for yourself. On second thoughts, save yourself the pain of reading the torrent of pseudo-social science bullshit masking a thin veneer of grumpy-man rage at the modern world, masking a thin veneer of misogyny, and take my word for it.

Well, fear not, because Musk and Zuckerberg are here to burn down the longhouse and unleash the free market masculine power to make America great again, and themselves even richer now that they have their man in the White House. Or more accurately, the man in the White House has become their man.

Here’s the kicker: these tech bros don’t just want to join the MAGA party. They want to trash what remains of the system while profiting handsomely. Zuckerberg’s Meta, for instance, has announced it’s scrapping diversity programs and relaxing hate-speech restrictions, because what Facebook really needed was more unhinged arguments in comment sections, now with added slurs and conspiracy theories.

Bro-podcast rage

If all this sounds insane, that’s because it is. The new-right, which is now just the right, is obsessed with women controlling the world when a self-confessed sexual predator - who also tried to overthrow the government - just waltzed into power off the back of bro-podcast rage and no one cares about the things he has said or done, especially to women.

If this is not proof of the fact that men run the world, or at least the wrong sort of men, then I don’t know what is. I’m sorry that you don’t like Karen from HR saying that you can’t use that language in the office, but it’s not the same as living in an inverted version of the Handmaid’s Tale, whatever that weightlifting guy on YouTube keeps telling you, in between trying to sell you supplements and insisting that you read Sapiens.

The forgotten people? Forgotten again

For the MAGA faithful, the shift is … awkward. The billionaires get champagne in the Rotunda while the “forgotten Americans” get cold toes on the Mall. What do they get in exchange? A few juicy pieces of red meat, of course. Trump is all-in on culture wars: he declared there are officially only two genders, renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” and promised to declare an emergency at the southern border. Practical solutions? None. Symbolic posturing? Plentiful.

It’s a neat encapsulation of Trump’s America: the billionaires get richer, and the average Trump voter gets the satisfaction of knowing that non-binary people are suffering more than they are. It’s patriotism by proxy, making America “great” by renaming bodies of water.

Grumbling while LA burns

The right has totally lost it. Take for example the recent fires in LA. As the effects of climate change are getting harder to ignore, conservatives are still whining that the real problems are Democrats spending money on clean energy - How else are we supposed to stop climate change? - with an added side of "climate change is not really a problem".

For example, this recent bit in The Knowledge, repackaging The Wall Street Journal, said:

“If Democrats ‘believe their own advertising’ about the dangers of climate change .. why haven’t they done more to protect against it? … Yet rather than investing in improvements, California’s liberal politicians prefer to spend cash on the likes of green energy subsidies. Last year, the governor’s budget included only $2.6bn for ‘forest and wildfire resilience’, compared to $14.7bn for zero-emission vehicles and the ‘clean energy’ transition. What gives? ‘Rooftop solar subsidies are no consolation for people who lose their homes.’ California’s virtue-signalling green policies won’t make the slightest bit of difference to global temperatures, because their CO2 emissions reductions are ‘dwarfed by increases elsewhere’. It’s time for Democrats to choose which is more important: ‘their climate obsessions or citizens’.”

What’s wrong with these people?

Okay. How are we supposed to stop these fires from happening again without green policies? It’s a microcosm of the right’s lunacy: they’ve won every major economic argument of the past four decades and now rage against the consequences of their own policies. Who needs forests when you’ve got tax cuts for billionaires?

What is wrong with these people? They are filled with hatred for some small green subsidies (and the liberal politicians who pass them) that they must rail against them while homes are being destroyed. Get ready for more of this under the new Trump regime.

A new low for the MAGA show

Detours about the climate aside, where does this leave Trump’s base? Well, they’ll cheer the culture war victories, feel a little tougher because the Gulf of America now exists, and conveniently ignore the fact that their man in the White House is now the billionaire’s man.

Trump hasn’t just forgotten the forgotten people. He handed them a participation trophy and ushered the billionaires into the winner’s circle. The tech billionaires are in charge now, and they’re not here to save America. They’re here to help themselves.

Welcome to the new MAGA era: same circus, shinier tent, and a tech bro at every table. What was that about Trump being the voice of the forgotten people again?

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.