By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, Donald Trump revealed a longing to seize one of America’s most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy’s administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see Trump this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he’ll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot.

Trump’s interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada—but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for “beautiful” and “classical” architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman’s instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to “make art great again,” as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it.

To the extent that Trump’s cultural designs offer a coherent vision, it shares his larger ambition to restore the country to a “golden age” (and a gilded one). In usurping control of Washington’s premier cultural institution, the annual bestower of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors (the closest America has to knighthood), he appears set on rebuilding Camelot in his own image.

But if Trump is trying to follow, or supplant, JFK, he is missing an important aspect of how the earlier president understood culture: not as a blunt instrument to be wielded for ideological or personal gain, but as a natural resource to tap for the long-term benefit of America’s image. Just as Trump is discovering that imperialism is a bigger lift in the 21st century than it was in the 19th, he is bound to learn that the unruly organism of American culture exists to be propagated, not tamed.

Even Camelot was only Camelot in the rearview mirror: King Arthur’s legendary medieval court was first invoked by Jackie Kennedy in the days after her husband’s assassination, as a way to begin shaping his legacy. In an interview with Life magazine, she paraphrased from the then-popular Alan Jay Lerner musical: “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.”

[Read: The Trump world order]

There was some substance behind the grieving widow’s spin. The Kennedys had brought the executive branch not only glamour but also a renewed emphasis on the arts. Robert Frost became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration when he recited “The Gift Outright” on the day JFK took the oath of office. Musicians, writers, and artists were frequently, and very publicly, invited to the White House, and the historic legacy of the house itself, its art and architecture, was the subject of Jackie Kennedy’s meticulous attention. The president sent out Duke Ellington as a “jazz ambassador” on international tours. In 1963, Kennedy proposed creating a federal advisory council on the arts, an idea that would find its expression in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. He was emphatic about the value of cultural patronage, saying in a speech after the death of Frost that he envisioned an America “which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

Camelot had its borders, of course, and the aesthetic vision of the Kennedys, for all their youth, was still a patrician one that excluded the more jagged and challenging forms of expression emerging in the 1960s (as for his personal taste, Jackie once joked that her husband’s favorite piece of music was “Hail to the Chief”). When James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and a group of other Black artists met with Attorney General (and brother of the president) Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 to express their exasperation with the slow pace of desegregation, the conversation was famously tense, leaving RFK annoyed and Baldwin confirmed in his feeling that the quasi-royal family was out of touch.

But Kennedy’s Camelot at least tried to elevate idealism, intellectualism, and the modern elegance of a pillbox hat. What might MAGAlot bring us? The jokes about Hulk Hogan becoming a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors were tired even before they were made. When, a week into the new regime, the comedian W. Kamau Bell wondered from the stage of the Kennedy Center, “How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he elicited audible groans. Trump hasn’t provided too many clues about his vision for programming beyond that it should stop being “wokey,” as he put it in a call to the new board. “I think we’re going to make it hot,” he told the group, now packed with loyalists. “And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.” The new chairman had not only declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term; he recently admitted that he hadn’t been to a single performance there.  

What he doesn’t want is much clearer to discern: drag shows. “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP,” he posted on February 7. He seemed to be referring to a couple of drag-based events at the center that represent a minuscule fraction of programming (the institution puts on roughly 2,000 events a year). As for what he would add to the schedule, the suggestions coming from Trump world sound like one-offs that would serve the sole purpose of giving Washington’s liberal establishment the finger. Steven Bannon wants to see the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men who had been jailed for attacking the Capitol on January 6, perform on opening night.

Trump does have his own neo-Baroque aesthetic: The Village People, Luciano Pavarotti, the grand chandelier he envisions hanging from the ceiling of the Oval Office. But these personal flourishes—like his desire to pave the Rose Garden to more closely resemble his patio at Mar-a-Lago—seem to have little chance of trickling down into the culture at large. Trump’s effect on the culture cannot be easily sussed out from a programming guide or a glance at the gold figurine recently screwed into a molding at the White House. He has been more effective at glorifying and encouraging a style of meanness, which appears in unlikely places but is easy to hear if you’re listening for it. Even Kendrick Lamar flaunted this style by making a diss track the focus and theme of his Super Bowl halftime show.

Read: Trump takes over the Kennedy Center

The most recent president to attempt the Camelot thing was Barack Obama, who elevated American art forms like jazz and hip-hop in ways meant to show that inclusiveness and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda would drop by the White House. Philip Roth was given a National Humanities Medal. And Barack and Michelle would happily bop to Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. But how much did this presidential boosterism influence the culture and the artists who make it? Obama’s regular book picks and Spotify playlists have come to seem, in his post-presidency, slightly self-indulgent and cringey. The overall effect is of professional curation designed to be respectfully broad (a little country, a little indie rock), while not veering toward blandness. The Obamas have always understood the potency of culture, which helps explain their move, in recent years, toward making it themselves; but despite the occasional Netflix documentary production credit, it’s harder to say that they have set an enduring agenda.

MAGAlot seems even less likely to shift the culture of the arts in any concrete way. This might be, in part, because Trump’s ambition misses what made Camelot matter: The Kennedy administration’s true legacy was the advancement of American soft power in service of real global policy goals. Just as Kennedy created USAID and the Peace Corps in part to showcase American abundance and goodwill, he deployed cultural influence to demonstrate, during the most intense period of the Cold War, that the U.S.-led vision of the world was just cooler than the rest. At one point, in 1962, he even sent Robert Frost to the Soviet Union, where he met with other poets, gave readings, and had a tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. Cultivating attractive, dynamic American arts, whether spaghetti Westerns or Broadway musicals, accrued long-term strategic benefits to the United States—and it still does. But reaping those benefits requires supporting people who make culture without dictating what that culture should look like.

Trump would find this hard. His zero-sum view of the world affords little patience for the churn and friction and provocation that actually makes for good art. He wants to be the minister of culture mostly because it’s the quickest way to upset his detractors, to pave over the rose gardens of generations past—and because, I imagine, the thought of a North Korean–style glorification of his rule pleases him. But after the drag shows are banned and the J6 chorus has had a chance to sing its “Justice for All” at the Kennedy Center, he may well discover what other aspiring authoritarian leaders have in the past—that culture is not easily bent. And when it is, it usually snaps back with force.

Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is moving quickly.

On Friday night, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter informed board members that some of their colleagues had already received termination notices from the administration. And she said that Trump appears to have the legal authority to take the unprecedented step of firing them before their six-year terms expire.

“Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the Center’s board members,” she wrote in the email, which was later posted on the Kennedy Center’s website. “There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”

The Kennedy Center is the premier performing-arts institution in the nation’s capital. It is home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and it hosts more than 2,000 performances and exhibits a year, including major foreign cultural exports.

Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon that he would terminate multiple board members and install himself as chair, hours after The Atlantic reported on his plans.

“The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from across our Nation,” he wrote. As chair, he promised to impose “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” (Since the chair is chosen by the board members, Trump presumably intends to appoint enough to secure a majority in favor of his chairmanship.)

What would that artistic vision look like? Trump’s rallies provide some glimpses into his cultural tastes, with a heavy diet of songs by Village People and Guns N’ Roses along with Broadway standards from Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. (He is, evidently, an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan.) He walks onstage to a recording of “God Bless the USA” sung by the current Kennedy Center trustee Lee Greenwood, who was appointed during Trump’s first term.

[Spencer Kornhaber: How the Village People explain Trump]

Ultimately, a Trumpian Kennedy Center might be distinguished more by what types of performances are not featured. In his original announcement, Trump criticized the organization for having hosted drag-show performances in the past, and said he will stop future performances.

Blaq Dinamyte, the president of Qommittee, a national network of drag artists and allies, condemned the president’s move in a statement Friday. “Banning an entire art form is censorship, plain and simple,” Dinamyte wrote.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment. The White House press office sent a link to Trump’s social-media post in response to a request for comment.

People familiar with Trump’s planning have said that his aggressive moves are an effort to avoid the clashes with artists that he endured during his first term. In 2017, he became the only president to ever skip the Kennedy Center Honors since the event began, in 1978, following threats by some of the 2017 honorees to boycott an accompanying White House reception.

The Kennedy Center board was created by Congress as part of the Smithsonian Institution. By law, it includes a number of Cabinet officials, federal officers, and members of congressional leadership. An additional 36 “general trustees” are appointed by the president. Joe Biden appointed 13 new members shortly before leaving office, including his close adviser Mike Donilon, the Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge, and the former Biden White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Trump likewise appointed some political allies and donors during his first term.

Even so, the institution has, until now, believed it could float above partisan politics.

“Throughout our history, the Kennedy Center has enjoyed strong support from members of congress and their staffs—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents,” Rutter wrote in her email. “Since our doors opened in 1971, we have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration. Since that time, the Kennedy Center has had a bi-partisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion.”

Trump, of course, doesn’t believe that the Kennedy Center has been upholding that nonpartisan tradition. Putting himself personally in charge seems unlikely to restore it.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

[David A. Graham: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

[Russell Berman: What Trump can (and probably can’t) do with his trifecta]

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

[George Packer: The end of democratic delusions]

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

The first great image of the second Donald Trump administration emerged last night at a Washington, D.C., basketball arena, where the soon-to-be-inaugurated president danced with the Village People. After Trump finished one of his classic stem-winding speeches, he was joined by five hunks of disco infamy: the bare-armed construction worker, the denim-crotched cowboy, the chaps-wearing biker, the befringed Native American chief, and the vinyl-booted cop. With his suit and pendulous red tie, Trump looked like he was in the band, like just another shade in a rainbow of satirical American masculinity.

The president’s affinity for the Village People’s music used to seem trollish, but now it’s just logical. The band formed in the 1970s when two French producers, one of them gay, put out a casting call that read “Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance and Have a Moustache.” Today those founders are dead, but the band’s frontman, Victor Willis, is alive to deny, at every chance, that “YMCA” is a queer anthem. Over the past few years, he’s also moved from condemning the Trump campaign’s use of the song to embracing it, in part because, as he recently explained on Facebook, “The financial benefits have been great.” The Trumpified Village People now project what seemed to be the greater theme of this past inauguration weekend: a strange new dream of American unity, washed of anything but cosmetic difference, joined in spectacle and opportunism.

At his previous inauguration, Trump had trouble booking performers to celebrate the results of a brutally divisive, closely contested election. Headliners included the faded rock band 3 Doors Down, a drummer famous for a cameo in The Matrix Reloaded, and the late, game-for-whatever Toby Keith (who told me in 2017, “The president of the frickin’ United States asks you to do something and you can go, you should go instead of being a jack-off”). The festivities felt confused and limp.

This inauguration, by contrast, followed an election in which virtually every demographic had moved to the right. Trump now has a big tent, so he’s going to put on a circus. The rosters for the inaugural galas weren’t quite A-list in terms of musicians who matter right now, but they did feature recognizable names across a range of genres and constituencies—the rapper Nelly; the reggaeton star Anuel AA; various right-leaning, country-aligned stalwarts such as Jason Aldean and Kid Rock. The greatest reversal was for Snoop Dogg, who once made fun of rappers who palled around with the president but now seemed happy to DJ for tuxedoed bros celebrating the first crypto president.

The Capitol Rotunda, where the inauguration ceremony was moved because of freezing weather, made the big tent feel intimate. As the faces of America’s past looked down from busts, the ceiling painted with E Pluribus Unum, various oddities of the present—such as Melania’s sleek, eye-hiding Hamburglar hat—instantly looked historical. The chamber was so small that much of the audience watched from an overflow room; the Democrats (including four previous presidents and their spouses, sans Michelle Obama) were scrunched up close to the Republicans, as if at a courthouse wedding. Behind Trump stood the most important new members of his coalition: the tech moguls Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

[Read: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

“The entire nation is rapidly unifying,” Trump said in his speech, before listing the many demographics—Black, Latino, old, young, and so forth—who’d helped deliver his victory. The speech had its dark passages, but it was no redux of 2017’s “American carnage” rant. Rather, Trump strung together positive, forward-looking statements about the country’s oncoming golden age—an endless summer on the “Gulf of America,” without crime or conflict, and our flag waving on Mars. He was followed by a bar joke’s worth of benedictions—from a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Black evangelical pastor. The latter, Lorenzo Sewell, spoke with rumbling flamboyance, calling for freedom to ring “from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” to “the curvaceous hilltops of California.”

As pageantry, the ceremony was effective. The opera singer Christopher Macchio bellowed “Oh, America” over military drums, with a hint of ’80s-metal righteousness. The repetitious nature of the president’s speech, stating and restating visions of prosperity and peace, served to distract from the various groups that may soon suffer: millions of immigrants he vowed to round up; trans and gender-nonconforming people navigating the government’s strict new definitions of gender; the “radical and corrupt establishment” whose leaders were sitting inches away, politely squinting at a man who’d vowed retribution against his rivals.

The spell created by pomp and circumstance broke a bit for one performance during the ceremony. Carrie Underwood, the 41-year-old American Idol star and country hitmaker, walked out to sing “America the Beautiful.” Something went wrong with her backing music, and she smiled in silence for nearly two minutes. Was this an omen? Would Trump’s promised golden age immediately turn out to be glitchy and underwhelming? But then Underwood told the Rotunda to just sing the words along with her. Everyone obliged—including Joe Biden and, by the end of the song, Kamala Harris. Democracy, it’s well understood, has been undergoing a trial. But, begrudgingly or not, the country’s still together.

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.