Americans woke up Tuesday to Donald Trump back in the White House. It was no dream: “Here I am,” he said in his Inaugural Address — three little words that, as Maureen Dowd wrote, were the most revealing part of his speech. As I got ready for work in the morning, everything I saw — on social media, in work email, on CNN and Fox News, in text messages from friends — was about Trump. Here we go again. A couple of hours later, I sat down with my colleagues Michelle Goldberg and David French, two Opinion columnists who write extensively about policy and politics in America, to drill down into Trump’s Day 1 actions and grapple with how he will challenge and change the country. David helped frame the conversation by noting the powerful degree to which Trump “has weaponized and exploited civic ignorance” as he tries to control and manipulate others. While Trump’s speech and executive actions didn’t surprise any of us, the degree of fealty and the lack of resistance to the 47th president that were on literal display in the Rotunda and elsewhere did — they were a striking contrast to the protests we saw in 2017. Our discussion turned quickly to Trump’s offensive against birthright citizenship, as well as his pardons of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, which our editorial board weighed in on Monday and Jeffrey Toobin wrote about in a guest essay on Tuesday. I raised how Trump seems to want to wrest influence away from the news media, Hollywood, academics, experts and others who shape public opinion and write the first drafts of history. “The reality is Trump wants to rewrite history,” I said in one exchange with Michelle. “Do you think he’ll succeed?” “There’s always this attempt to sort of retcon whatever he says into something more reasonable and something less shocking,” Michelle replied, adding: “I know that this is probably the most overused word of the last decade, but it’s a kind of gaslighting, and it works on you after a while. You think, ‘Well, was it really as bad as all that?’ I think that this is a reminder that it was and is.” How’s that for Day 2? Read Opinion’s coverage: Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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