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.

Eight years ago, with his “American carnage” speech, Donald Trump delivered what was likely the darkest inaugural address in U.S. history. During his second inaugural, he tried for a slightly more uplifting message.

“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success,” Trump said. And although he listed many challenges, he assured the nation that they would be “annihilated” by American momentum. (Yes, the word choice was strange.) “The golden age of America,” he declared, “begins right now.”

Perhaps it would be more aptly called a Gilded Age. Trump was joined in the Capitol Rotunda by many of the nation’s richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. The attendance of the business titans was rendered conspicuous by the small space. (Other major donors to the inauguration were forced to watch on a livestream after the ceremony was moved inside because of frigid temperatures. Don’t shed a tear for them; they made the donations to curry favor and influence, not for the view.) Their presence also added a strange dimension to Trump’s complaint that “for many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens.”

[James Fallows: ‘American carnage’: The Trump era begins]

This was the first time since Grover Cleveland’s second inauguration, in 1885—during America’s first Gilded Age—that a president was sworn in for a nonconsecutive second term. And many of the policies and ideas in the speech evoked the late 1800s more than any recent presidency.

The speech was saturated with 19th-century imperialism. Trump announced that he would order the name of America’s highest peak to be changed from Denali back to its old name, Mount McKinley, and he extolled the 25th president’s use of tariffs. (Left unmentioned was the fact that William McKinley was beloved, and bankrolled, by the plutocrats of his era, and twice defeated the populist William Jennings Bryan.) Trump also said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” and he promised to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars,” invoking the controversial slogan of expansionism. Picking up an idea he had voiced in recent weeks, he also vowed to seize the Panama Canal from Panama.

And why wouldn’t Trump be feeling triumphant? The ceremony was held inside the Rotunda, where a little more than four years ago, supporters who he’d instigated to storm the building paraded through with a Confederate flag. This time around, Senator Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Inaugural Ceremony Committee, heralded America’s “peaceful transfer of power” in the same building where it was disrupted on January 6, 2021. A few minutes later, Trump stood face-to-face with Chief Justice John Roberts, who granted him broad immunity in a ruling last summer, and took the same oath of office that he flagrantly broke at the end of his first term. His mood was not only celebratory, but messianic.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court puts Trump above the law]

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said, describing the failed assassination attempt against him last summer. “Over the last eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any other president in our 250-year history.” (Perhaps he forgot that McKinley was more than just grazed by an assassin’s bullet.)

In particular, he railed against “the vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department”—a reference to the federal felony charges brought against him for attempting to subvert the 2020 election and for refusing to hand over classified documents he removed from the White House. “Never again will the power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” he said, a vow that sits uneasily with promises of retribution from himself and from his nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel.

Historically, presidents have used their inaugural addresses to pivot from the blue-sky promises of the campaign trail to the more sober language of governing. Rather than dwell on campaign vows they may struggle to keep, they reach for gauzy and unifying language. This, however, is not Trump’s forte. In major speeches, when Trump strains for the tone of an inspirational statesman, he usually ends up sounding more like a motivational speaker. (“In America, the impossible is what we do best,” he intoned today.) This afternoon’s often repetitive speech is unlikely to live on as a work of oratory. Nor did Trump make much effort to reach out to or reconcile with the voters who don’t support him, although he promised that “national unity is returning to America.” He boasted about his (very narrow) margin in the popular vote and victories in seven swing states. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom,” he said.

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

Instead, Trump delivered something akin to his stump speech: a meandering laundry list of policy promises of varying degrees of plausibility. He called for a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said. He promised to impose major tariffs. He said he would deploy U.S. troops to the Mexican border, expand immigration enforcement inside the country, and declare drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations. He also signaled an executive order that will continue the attacks on people who don’t conform to traditional gender norms. “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.

But much of the speech was devoted to things that are almost certainly never going to happen. He vowed to beat inflation but didn’t say how. He said he’d establish an External Revenue Service to handle the money he claimed tariffs would bring in, but this would require an act of Congress, as would the Department of Government Efficiency he claims he’ll create. (One wonders what the efficiency hawks at DOGE would have to say about the proposed ERS, given that it would represent a superfluous bureaucracy created to perform a function already handled by Customs and Border Patrol.) This was all a warm-up for Trump’s most audacious promise. “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable,” he said.

It was an appealing promise. But the world already knows what four years of a Trump presidency looks like. Serenity, peace, and predictability were not the hallmarks of his first term, and they are unlikely to describe the second any better.