He promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico, take back the Panama Canal, “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars” and reclaim the fighting spirit of the frontier. It would be a “revolution of common sense,” Donald Trump said in his second Inaugural Address — a fight that would rid this country of its “radical and corrupt establishment” and usher in a new golden age of prosperity. The Trump who appeared onstage in the Capitol Rotunda on Monday was triumphant and vindicated — full, as always, of contradictions: a president casting himself as a great peacemaker and unifier while accusing his predecessor of a “horrible betrayal.” We asked 14 of our columnists and contributors — a roster of libertarians, dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters, liberals, pollsters, strategists, even a former speechwriter — to pick the best and worst moments from the address and describe the small but revealing moments that stood out to them. “This was subdued, teleprompter Trump,” the columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “running through a fairly predictable list of executive-order agenda items, avoiding the most polarizing of his potential executive actions, staying mostly on script, not telling us that much about what the biggest flashpoints of his first 100 days will be.” The columnist David French took a different view: Trump “painted the darkest possible picture of the state of the nation and the character of his opponents. And he set himself up as a kind of messiah figure, the man saved by God for the sake of national greatness. If you want to lay the groundwork for authoritarianism, that’s exactly how to do it.” For some of our contributors, the optics — and what went unsaid — were more revealing than anything included in the speech: “It was very telling that the tech oligarchs had front-row seats, in front of the cabinet,” Michelle Goldberg, another columnist, wrote. “The age of algorithmic feudalism has begun.” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration, homed in on what Trump didn’t say: “There was no mention of allies, global institutions, Ukraine or even the existence of climate change; America’s enemies were cast as Mexican cartels and Panama. Anyone watching the last four Inaugural Addresses around the world has learned that America cannot sustain a consistent foreign policy or even worldview.” As we enter the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, we’ll see how that’s borne out. This morning, we’re laying out the stakes for you, with essays from two professors, Filipe Campante and Raymond Fisman, on the crony capitalism of the tech titans; from the Yale historian Greg Grandin on Trump’s attempts to tap into the restless spirit of the American frontier, and others. Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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