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Washington: Donald Trump sat at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders for the cameras and taking questions from a small pool of journalists clumped in the Oval Office. The orders traversed his pardons for the January 6 rioters, the ceasefire in the Middle East, immigration, tariffs, energy, Greenland – you name it.
“Does Biden ever do news conferences like this?” Trump asked the reporters midway through his musings about TikTok. “How many news conferences, Peter, has he done like this?”
Peter Doocy from Fox News duly replied: “Like this? Zero.”
The four Donalds: Trump takes the oath at the US Capitol, speaks off the cuff outside the ceremony, takes the stage at the Capitol One Arena and returns to the Oval Office.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
They might be right about that. It’s difficult to picture Biden – certainly lately – casually freewheeling his thoughts about Gaza (“a phenomenal location”), whether he might send US special forces into Mexico to hunt down cartels (“stranger things have happened”) and the pledge to end the Ukraine war on the first day in office (“this is only half a day, I have another half a day left”).
The calm, chatty, discursive and, above all, confident Trump we witnessed in the Oval Office after the day of ceremonies and speeches was different to the Trumps we saw earlier. And though they all share the same fixations and grievances, each Trump we encountered showed us another iteration of the 47th president.
In the Capitol Rotunda, we had Trump’s best approximation of a statesman: still vindictive and aggrieved, but controlled, on message and maybe even a little humbled by the occasion. Later, he explained that Vice President J.D. Vance had counselled him to take out of the speech “some really rough stuff” – rants about the January 6 insurrectionists (Trump calls them “hostages”) and Biden’s decision to pardon his family before leaving office, among others.
No matter, the second Trump would take care of that. Downstairs at the Emancipation Hall, which housed an overflow of guests who couldn’t fit in the Rotunda, Trump transformed into his stand-up comedian alter ego. Would it be wrong to say the president missed his true calling? You can see how much it pleases him when a line lands and he has the (admittedly sympathetic) audience eating out of his hands. Just in case it wasn’t clear, he told us, he thought the second speech was much better than his actual inaugural address.
Next, he headed back to Capital One Arena, where he’d rallied the faithful only a day before. This was soapbox Trump: boisterous, cruel, sometimes randomly loud and always performative. This time, he came with props: a bunch of executive orders the newly minted president signed with thick black Sharpies which he then tossed into the crowd. “Could you imagine Biden doing this?” he asked at one point. (With every type of Trump, one constant is the need to mock his rivals.)
Later in the Oval Office, with the show over, we got the final phase: fireside Trump. He mused, he pondered, he deliberated; he streamed his consciousness into television sets around the world. He looked comfortable sitting in that big leather chair but then again, he has sat there before. Ever so casually, he signed into law executive order after executive order that would have a seismic impact on not just the United States but the world.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on his first day back in the job.Credit: AP
Gone was the US involvement in the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organisation. Instead, there would be fossil fuels and tariffs and pardons for the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those who used violence against their peers and the police. Indeed, while Trump was more serene inside the Oval Office, he was at his most animated when defending the insurrectionists.
In his reflective mood, he spoke at length about why he wants to save the Chinese-owned app TikTok from its legislated ban. He seemed to suggest security concerns were overblown. “Remember, they make telephones in China, they make all sorts of things in China, nobody ever complains about that. The only one they complain about is TikTok.”
He went on: “TikTok is largely about kids. If China’s gonna get information about young kids … I don’t know. To be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that.”
The app’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, was one of many tech types present at Trump’s inauguration, seated right next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for the post of director of national intelligence. We don’t know what was said between them, nor the other conversations Trump had at the Capitol, nor the thousands of similar interactions that have taken place at the balls and luncheons and breakfasts and after-parties where the powerful and the wealthy have rubbed shoulders these past few nights.
We saw four public faces of Trump on inauguration day – the statesman, the comedian, the demagogue and the brooder – but it’s the fifth, the dealmaker behind closed doors, that we need to watch.
