The New Yorker:

The reëlected President reprised his “American Carnage” address, with repeated jabs at America’s “decline” under Joe Biden, but his central theme, as always, was himself.

By Susan B. Glasser

Donald Trump’s most enduring theme is himself—it always was and always will be. He is the Poet Laureate of self-aggrandizement. Hyperbole is how he lives and breathes. Everything he does is the greatest, the strongest, the boldest. On the eve of his return to the White House, the first ex-President in more than a century to reclaim the office, he promised thousands of red-hatted supporters at a rally in Washington “the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first hundred days of any Presidency in American history.” No need to wait for history to render its judgment. Back in November, when he defeated Kamala Harris only four years after being repudiated by the voters, he had declared his comeback win a result of “the greatest political movement of all time,” and promised that his second term in office would become “the golden age of America.”

Trump, who first gained fame in the nineteen-eighties for erecting a gilded skyscraper bearing his name in New York, returned to the theme of a golden age on Monday, in an Inaugural Address that, again and again, conflated himself and the country he will once again lead. The speech included a remarkable statement—that the Supreme Being had called this noted sinner back to power. “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any President in our two-hundred-and-fifty-year history,” Trump claimed—a reference, I suppose, to the two assassination attempts he faced during the 2024 campaign and the multiple legal challenges that eventually made him the first convicted felon ever to be elected President. His conclusion? “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

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