Trump Presidency; round two
Yes, today (Monday, January 20, 2025) is a nation holiday, but not for the reasons some may think or mistakenly assign it to the Presidential Inauguration ceremony of the newly ratified 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump. Instead it is a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
For Donald Trump his inauguration today and return to the Presidency was an act of retribution and validation not traditionally associated with Presidential Inaugurations.
The 47th president’s 29-minute address on Monday, just after noon ET, painted a familiar Trump theme of a country in disarray, one seized by “years of a radical and corrupt establishment,” with the pillars of society “broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” Trump went on to say that America “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”
The reality counter-balance to the newly inaugurated President’s rant was its misleading and incomplete assessment of a country that has had under the previous leadership (President Biden) a growing economy, falling inflation, slowing illegal immigration, a record-breaking stock market, the lowest levels of violent crime in years, a revolutionary national clean energy policy advancing the County’s energy economy, lowering of consumer energy prices at home, and a military that has limited engagement in conflicts around the world.
Trump’s message to the Country earlier today went to the core of his political appeal: convincing his supporters that he — and he alone — can fix what ails (or does not ail) the country. And it represented a reprise of how he framed his first presidency — as a constant fight against enemies, foreign and domestic.
“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and, indeed, their freedom from this,” President Donald Trump told the Country on Monday, and what proved to be the longest inaugural address in modern history. “America’s decline is over,” he declared.
Eight years ago, Mr. Trump described “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” schools that teach students nothing, and “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
In Monday’s inaugural address Trump was more prescriptive and detailed as he ticked off a variety of policy goals that he said he intended to achieve. “The entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda,” he said on Monday, “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.”
National Mandate?
“Very importantly,” Trump added, “…we had a powerful win in all seven swing states and the popular vote. We won by millions of people.” Donald J. Trump (Republican) won 77,284,118 votes, which accounted for 49.8% of the total votes cast, the second-highest vote total in U.S. history, only behind Joe Biden’s (Democratic) 2020 vote result was still higher in the number of votes than Trump received in 2020 vote count, and lost to Biden.
Biden’s 2020 presidential garnered 306 electoral votes and 81,283,098 popular votes, accounting for 51.3% of the votes cast. Trump’s 2024 results neither merit the popular myth Republicans and Trump himself often cite as justification of a so-called sweeping agenda that his election in 2024 enabled and a landslide for him resulting a national mandate for his agenda.
The 2024 United States presidential election results did not reflect a national mandate, in spite of Republicans statements. The election did produce an outcome of Republican control of the Senate, and the narrowest of margin in the House resulting in complete party control of both congressional bodies as the 2025 legislative session begin.
Donald Trump (Republican) won the presidency with in 2024 with:
- 77,296,195 popular votes (49.8%)
Kamala Harris (Democratic) lost less than 1.5% of the total vote:
- 75,004,726 popular votes (48.3%)
Energy Markets React to Trump’s Inauguration Speech — a big oil win
“Companies involved in oil and gas exploration, and extraction stand to gain as U.S. environmental safeguards and a national climate policy are dismantled and replaced by increases in national fossil fuel investments and greater taxpayer subsidies supporting dirty energy interests”, Reuters reported.
The White House also declared on Monday that President Trump would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the global pact among nations coordinating the fight to slow planetary climate change.
By withdrawing from the accord, the United States will join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only four countries not party to the agreement, under which nations work together to keep global warming below levels that could lead to to environmental catastrophe. The move, one of several energy-related announcements in the hours immediately following Trump’s inauguration, represents an about-face in United States participation in the global climate agreement and future negotiations.
During his first term Mr. Trump withdrew from the Paris accord, but then President Biden quickly rejoined in 2020 after winning the White House. Scientists, activists and Democratic officials assailed the move as one that would deepen the climate crisis and backfire on American workers.
Coupled with Mr. Trump’s other energy measures on Monday, withdrawal from the pact signals his administration’s determination to double down on fossil-fuel extraction and production, and to move away from clean-energy technologies including electric vehicles, solar power, wind turbines, and other successful clean energy options now addressing global warming and other fossil fuel impacts…
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