I feel like I’m seeing two different presidential transitions happen. It has been an official one with all its glory. This is what we call a peaceful transfer of power. State of the Vote for President of the United States. I saw Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the verification of elections. She lost. I saw President Joe Biden welcome his successor, President Donald Trump, back to the White House. The Honorable William J. Clinton I saw every living former president gather under the Capitol Rotunda to honor Trump’s second inauguration. What a difference four years before that inauguration, when a mob stormed the Capitol. After Trump tried and failed to include the election results, he did not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. Today we are not celebrating the victory of a candidate, but the cause of democracy. And now, my friends, democracy has prevailed. This transfer, the formal transfer of presidential power, has been orderly. But this second transition is not a transition of power, but a transition of the political system, a change in the rules and expectations of power. Breaking news from the White House tonight. President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter Biden. For months, the president insisted he wouldn’t. For President Biden, blowback is certainly coming from all sides. And it’s not just Republicans who are crying hypocrisy. I understand Joe Biden pardoning Hunter Biden. Hunter had become a fixture of the Trumpist right. Hunter Biden is guilty of human sex trafficking, and we have the receipts, Mr. Biden, and the idea that he’s going to take revenge on him individually seems very real. Joe Biden has already lost two children. Others may disagree. I had trouble begging him for his refusal to lose a third. President Biden leaves the White House with an eleventh-hour pardon. But then came a series of pardons, culminating in those of Anthony Fauci and the Biden family. This is going to set a terrible precedent. And it wasn’t just forgiveness. There was a refusal to enforce the ban on TikTok that Biden himself signed into law. And with it came the strange decision to declare that the Equal Rights Amendment had now been ratified, as Virginia had accepted it in 2020, becoming the 38th state to do so. Today, I endorse the Equal Rights Amendment, which removed all necessary barriers to inclusion in the U.S. Constitution. Now, the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land. But this was not true. This has not been verified. Congress set a 1982 deadline for ratification. Biden’s own Justice Department is of the view that Virginia’s late action is pointless. The term has not been validated, and the Biden administration knows it has not been validated. All this was just an attempt to make the President appear more powerful, more productive than he actually was. And why wait until the last days of his presidency? Changing the Constitution under a controversial theory is not something you do on your way out the door. A 2020 Biden would have done none of this on important issues like family amnesty. He said he wouldn’t do it, and then he did it. It feels, in its own way, to the new Biden administration. Presidential powers are those that can be exercised by the President. I’m not naive. I recognize that the President has been testing the limits of his powers since the beginning of the Republic. But for a president like Biden, whose core message was about preserving America’s constitutional democracy, and not only that, but the informal system of norms and values ​​and practices that shape that system. But the president’s departure in this way was a profound statement of his own. Maybe the message was malicious. Perhaps it was acceptance because it is clear that things have to be done differently now. The start of Donald Trump’s second term certainly revealed a president intent on governing based on what he can get away with. Trump immediately announced that he was revoking birthright citizenship, unilaterally changing the clear language of the Constitution and daring the courts to block it. He’s freeing TikTok from the plain language of the law, so he can figure out a way to save it. He is pardoning the January 6 rioters. He is renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Denali to Mount McKinley. What struck me in Trump’s inaugural address was how almost everything mentioned was an executive action that Trump would take and the courts would decide to accept or reject. He spoke very little of the law. He wanted to persuade Congress to pass it. What Trump is interested in, what he can do alone. And watching Trump take the oath of office from good seats were the CEOs of the big platforms that control America’s attention. X owner Elon Musk and Meta CEO Tesla Mark Zuckerberg were present. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And a little further back, there was the CEO of TikTok. For all Trump’s talk about manufacturing jobs and auto plants and infrastructure, the CEOs of GM and GE and Ford and Caterpillar weren’t in the room. It wasn’t just a gathering of America’s rich. It was our willful oligarchy that rallied to Trump. All this happened when the Trump family launched a crypto coin in their name, a meme coin, you can’t spend it. This is just one way to invest in Trump’s fortunes. Investing in Trump. To make him richer. Memecoin’s price has risen above $70, and the Trump family and its partners appear to own about 80 percent of the coins, making them worth tens of billions of dollars. And then Melania Trump. He launched his own meme coin, which also grew, although it seemed to hurt the value of the Trump meme coin. It’s all madness to even try to describe. But Melania’s meme coin comes after she sold her biopic and another project to Amazon for $40 million. The scale of graft and graft at this point is staggering, and it’s all out in the open. It is not that politics will be corruption free in 2018 or 2022. But this is a new age of brazenness, of cashing in power. And who will stop Trump and his family? Who will tell them no? We talk about America’s system of government as if it were a solid thing tied to constitutions and institutions, like a belt around the waist. But it really is a pile of principles in a trench coat. Eliminate the rules and everything changes. I can imagine what we are seeing, which leads to a reaction. I don’t think it’s safe. I don’t think it is good politics to rub America’s face in so much elitism and corruption. I can also see this leading to a consolidation of power as Trump and his allies are united to protect their power, united to support each other, as has happened in many other countries. But we are entering a new era anyway. Power did not just pass from one president to another. It moves from one regime to another, one set of rules to another. And you can see it. So obviously because the old regime ended before the new one started.
