It doesn’t matter whether or not he actually touched that Bible. At 12:01 pm EST, the invisible pulse of power surged out of the battered volume toward those five, frankly normal-sized digits of Donald John Trump’s right hand.
And it happened. Sitting a few feet away, in the rotunda of the Capitol building, I saw the moment that the wokerati of the world had worked so hard to prevent.
I saw the resurrection of the man they despised and vilified: the second inauguration that many believed was morally, politically, legally, and perhaps even biologically impossible.
By taking that oath, with Melania at his side in her blue boater, Donald Trump became not only the 45th president but also the 47th, completing the most spectacular political comeback of all time.
His speech ranged from growing optimism to pure optimism of a kind seemingly calculated to have his opponents chewing the rug.
It began with an almost crooning sweetness. A golden era had begun, he announced, leaning over the podium and looking askance at us.
“Sunlight flows all over the world,” he whispered, and as we looked up at the immense dome above us we saw obedient rays of sunlight seeming to pass through the windows.
And then, little by little, he began to increase the volume of his boasting.
Donald Trump takes the oath of office alongside his wife Melania at his inauguration at the US Capitol building in Washington.
With America’s tech titans behind him (some of them now noticeably more deferential than they were), he proclaimed that the next four years would be the greatest in American history. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook: all of them were sitting right behind Trump, as if to affirm the new symbiosis between the president and the super-oligarchs of the United States. Everyone applauded.
To widespread acclaim, he promised to crush inflation, expel illegal immigrants, restore American manufacturing and plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars.
He was going to somehow regain American control of the Panama Canal, an announcement that got a pretty harsh reception from the former presidents behind him.
He was going to break restrictions on American oil and gas and his message to the hydrocarbon industry was “drill, baby, drill.”
Once again, this didn’t seem to go down too well with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
This drove his followers into paroxysms of excitement.
From now on, he promised that there would only be two genders recognized by the United States government: male and female. This received another standing ovation.
In fact, almost everything received a standing ovation, and it got to the point where I began to follow the example of one of the well-groomed young Trumps in front of me, who only seemed to stand up on very special occasions.
Trump, 78, kisses Melania, 53, who has become first lady for the second time.
As we neared the climax of the speech, Trump highlighted something about America: that it encourages its citizens to try to achieve the impossible. In the United States, unlike other countries, they can be successful.
“The impossible is what we do best,” he said, and to prove it he cited, naturally, his own career: his surprising political resurgence. Looking at the facts, it is difficult to disagree.
This is a 78-year-old man who has overcome countless legal cases against him, most of them vexatious and all of them purely designed to keep him out of the polls. He has fought day after day for four years to regain the presidency.
He has spoken at hundreds of rallies and public events, weaving his monologues until he was hoarse from the effort. He has tweeted tirelessly in his own inimitable voice.
He has approached groups that distrusted him and little by little he has won them over.
By dint of a phenomenal work ethic and his refusal to give up, he has become the second man in history to serve two non-consecutive terms as president.
In November he became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.
Above all, he demonstrated his bravery when he came within a millimeter of death when a high-velocity bullet hit his ear at a rally in Pennsylvania.
At the inauguration were Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez with her fiancé Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, texting furiously with Elon Musk.
Who among us would have the courage to stand up – as he did – and with a bloody face urge his followers to “fight, fight, fight”?
Trump had come to the conclusion, he told us, that the Lord had intervened. In what must be considered one of the most alpha male statements of all time, he said that God had saved him personally to make America great again.
No one disagreed with this extraordinary proposal. On the contrary, they gave him another standing ovation.
There were many people in that audience who believed it was literally true: that Trump now ranks among the great figures immortalized on the canvases and statues around the room.
Washington, Lincoln… and now Trump, a man sent to fulfill America’s manifest destiny.
It’s hard to overstate the excitement and confidence being generated in Washington by the second coming of real estate agent-turned-TV star Trump.
On Wall Street, Trump’s optimism and confidence are being communicated to the markets and, for the foreseeable future, US growth will outpace that of the UK and the rest of Europe.
But it’s not just the rich who are turning to Trump, and it certainly wasn’t the rich who flocked to the Capitol yesterday, in -3 temperatures, to wave their red Maga flags and to catch a glimpse of their hero.
Musk is Trump’s most important advisor, writes Boris Johnson. He advocates for clean transportation and believes that America’s electricity needs could be met with 100 square miles of solar panels.
For hundreds of millions of Americans, the orange-haired billionaire is a man who sees things their way and shares their pain and anxieties. He is also a man who can really get things done.
They believe they can defeat the drug cartels and solve the problem of illegal immigration.
They believe him when he says he can make America respected around the world.
This weekend they had another gigantic test of Trump’s effectiveness: the agreement between Israel and Hamas and the release of the first hostages.
No one here believes that would have happened without Trump’s intervention.
And for millions of others – in the United States and around the world – that speech, of course, will have done nothing to allay their fears.
They will cling to their lax language about taking back Panama. They will obsess over his apparent indifference to global warming and his encouragement of fossil fuels.
They will worry that by insisting on America’s absolute right to free speech, he will somehow foster a brutal new culture of verbal aggression. Above all, they will be disturbed by his complete silence on the issue of Ukraine, the biggest war in Europe in 80 years.
What does it mean? Will Trump abandon this completely innocent country and give victory to Putin?
Well, we’ll see, but I remain firmly among the optimists.
Regardless of what Trump says about drilling, his most important advisor is Elon Musk, who champions clean transportation and believes all of America’s electricity needs could be met with 100 square miles of solar panels.
Trump talks a lot about tariffs, but he did it last time and ended up signing a free trade agreement with China.
The British government should get its act together and agree a similar free trade agreement.
The Trump administration is prepared in a way that Biden simply was not.
As for Ukraine, I cannot believe for a second that Trump would allow the United States – and the West – to be humiliated by a capitulation to Vladimir Putin.
As the ceremony ended with chants of “USA, USA,” Trump clenched his fist and left to sign 200 executive orders with his seismograph’s signature.
All human institutions need a leader and the world is no exception. For better or worse, the United States is the leader of our planet, and things generally go better when that leadership is strong.
That strong leadership is what Trump is evidently determined to offer.