Washington: Donald Trump sat at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders for the cameras and answering questions from a small group of journalists clustered in the Oval Office. The orders covered pardoning the January 6 rioters, a ceasefire in the Middle East, immigration, tariffs, energy, Greenland… you name it.
“Does Biden ever hold press conferences like this?” Trump asked reporters midway through his thoughts on TikTok. “How many press conferences, Peter, have you done like this?”
Peter Doocy of Fox Information duly responded: “Like this? Zero.”
The Donald Four: Trump takes the oath of office at the US Capitol, speaks spontaneously outside the ceremony, takes the Capitol One Enviornment stage, and returns to the Oval Office.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Maybe they’re right about that. It’s hard to imagine Biden – at least lately – casually thinking about Gaza (“a phenomenal place”), whether he might send U.S. special forces to Mexico to hunt down the cartels (“stranger things have happened”), and the promise of ending the Ukrainian War on his first day in office (“this is only half a day, I have another half day”).
The calm, talkative, discursive and, above all, confident Trump we witnessed in the Oval Office after the day of ceremonies and speeches was different from the Trumps we saw before. And while they all share the same fixations and complaints, each Trump we encountered showed us another version of the 47th president.
In the Capitol Rotunda we had the the best approximation of a statesman: still vengeful and aggrieved, but controlled, on message, and perhaps even a little humiliated by the occasion. Later, he explained that Vice President JD Vance had advised him to remove “some really harsh stuff” from the speech: rantings about the January 6 insurrectionists (Trump calls them “hostages”) and Biden’s decision to pardon his family earlier. to leave office. inter alia.
Never mind, the second Trump would take care of that. Downstairs, in the Emancipation Hall, which housed a large number of guests who could not fit in the Rotunda, Trump transformed into his comic alter ego. Would it be incorrect to say that the president failed to fulfill his true calling? You can see how much he likes it when a line comes in and he has the (admittedly sympathetic) audience eating out of his hands. In case it wasn’t clear, he told us, he thought the second speech was much better than his current inaugural speech.
He then returned to Capital One Enviornment, where he had gathered his faithful just a day earlier. This was grandstand: boisterous, merciless, sometimes randomly loud and always performative. This time, it came with props: a stack of executive orders that the new president signed in thick black markers and then tossed into the crowd. “Can you imagine Biden doing this?” he asked at one point. (In every type of Trump, one constant is the need to mock his rivals.)
