| It is Tuesday. Donald Trump is president now. And of the now 60 inaugural addresses delivered in this country’s history, George Will says that the one Trump gave on Monday was worse than 59 of them. (Yes, that includes Trump’s first.) His speech missed by a wide margin the “solemn yet celebratory” tone George says is required, instead focusing — surprise! — on Trump’s many, many grievances. It was, George writes, “a reminder of why many Americans watch the political class in action the way they swallow an emetic: only when they cannot avoid it.” How far rhetoric has fallen since that list’s topper: President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in 1865. In Philip Bump’s debut column for Opinions, he recounts his recent wander to the Lincoln Memorial, where all 701 words of the 16th president’s speech are engraved on the wall. That, Philip writes, is the one Americans needed this week after so many years of turmoil; a Lincolnesque exhortation of “malice toward none” and “charity for all” would have gone a long way. Karen Tumulty’s best advice for the Trump inauguration speech is to just … ignore it. We were taught this lesson last time but clearly need reminding, Karen says: “Watch what he does, and don’t get distracted — or lulled — by what he says.” A prime example, Jim Geraghty writes, is Trump’s executive action to block the law restricting TikTok — which overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress, was signed by President Joe Biden and upheld by the Supreme Court. Is that really upholding the law, as Trump swore to do in his oath of office? “Not a great start!” Jim writes. And that executive action is just the beginning. As Karen points out, Trump previewed in his speech (the only “part that mattered”), that roughly 200 more orders and proclamations and memorandums (oh, my!) are expected right off the bat. That swift action, writes Marc Thiessen, is the hallmark of Trump finally getting “what he was denied eight years ago: a political honeymoon.” If you skip over all the speech’s rough stuff, as Marc did, you’re left with sunlight and a golden age and an America that “will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before.” All that was indeed in there! Do we listen to it? Or do we wait and watch? Chaser: Five views on Trump’s inauguration not enough? You’re in luck; readers sent in 18 more ways of looking at the swearing-in. Power surge Enough words. One of the most telling images to come out of the inauguration was the titan’s row of tech billionaires sitting in seats that had become even more plum when the shebang moved indoors. Governors were relegated to the nosebleeds, but the richest of the rich got to sit front and center? “This was an inauguration of the oligarchs, the billionaires’ ball come to Washington,” Ruth Marcus writes. “The sheer sight of these billionaires lined up behind the president suggested a partnership between wealth and power that was disturbing, not encouraging.” Ruth’s column is a warning of how much Trump and the tech lords need one another, and how quickly codependent relationships can explode, hurting everyone around them. Another historical comparison: the relationship between President Woodrow Wilson and railroad magnate Edward House, which Gary Ginsberg chronicles in his book on presidents’ powerful friends. In an essay, Ginsberg explains how Wilson vested House with more and more power — until House overstepped at the negotiations to end World War I, and Wilson cut ties at the most critical moment. It’s possible the world lost out on a League of Nations (and instead got World War II) as a result. Ginsberg identifies the key to being a good first friend: knowing “there was only one top dog, and it was the president. The better metaphor for the Trump-Musk friendship might be two Cybertrucks racing toward each other head-on.” Chaser: Trump’s own little tech endeavor — his memecoin cryptocurrency — is nothing more than a “whizbang-sounding Ponzi scheme,” Catherine Rampell writes. | 
