Hours into his inauguration day, president Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting the freedom of speech and on Tuesday morning, he got a mouthful of the same from unexpected quarters.
Attending the morning service at the National Cathedral the morning after the inauguration balls is another presidential tradition, perhaps to beg forgiveness for all the bad dancing. Just over a week had passed since Trump and Barack Obama had shared a conspicuously jovial moment before the funeral service of the centurion president, Jimmy Carter.
Tuesday morning’s service was just wrapping up when the bishop, Mariann Budde, broke away from the formalities to make a direct plea to the 47th president. She spoke for over two minutes and Mr Trump sat and listened.
“In the name of God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people who pick our crops, and clean our offices, who labour in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals: they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation but the vast majority of them are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbours and are faithful members of our churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples. I ask you to have mercy Mr president on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.”
By any event, it was a dramatic moment and was instantly interpreted as either insolent or inspirational, according to the prevailing national pollical divide. If president Trump listened with the unimpressed air of a hotshot driver hearing the examiner explain the myriad ways in which he failed his test, he still listened.
But the faces of those surrounding the president were a hoot. Vice-president Vance looked like a vertigo sufferer who somehow wound up on a rollercoaster. Lara Trump looked stunned. Usha Vance, the second lady, merely interested.
It was the latest reminder that high-talk drama and high visibility is the theme of a Donald Trump presidency. His first full day in office – or, as Trump dolefully put it, “my first day back from having a nice life”– provided another extraordinary range of talking points and developments.
By five o’clock, Mr Trump was back in the White House, hosting in the Roosevelt, and for the second day in a row, a number of very, very rich men.
But these were new faces. There was Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle. Beside him, Masayoshi Son, Softbank CEO, and finally the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The trio was there to announce the formation of Stargate, a new US company pledging to invest at least $500 billion in AI infrastructure, with the promise of creating 100,000 jobs immediately. The first data centre will be completed in the old cow town of Abilene, Texas, with nine more under construction and ten to come later. Details were light on the nature of the jobs, but Ellison revealed the true ambition of the new project as having a potentially transformative effect on global healthcare and disease.
“One of the most exciting things we’re working on using the tools that Sam and Masa are providing is a cancer vaccine. It is very interesting. Turns out cancer tumours ... little fragments of those tumours float around in your blood. You can do early cancer detection with a blood test, and using AI to look at the blood test you can find the cancers that are seriously threatening the person.
“Beyond that, once we gene sequence that cancer tumour, you can then vaccinate the person. Design a vaccine for every single person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make MRMA vaccine, you can make that robotically in about 48 hours. So, imagine early cancer detection and the development of a vaccine for your particular cancer and having that in 48 hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.”
As beacons of Trump’s vision of America’s new golden age go, this was no shabby promise. But the occasion once again underlined Trump’s nimble and strengthening alliance with tech titans of the world. The absence of Elon Musk was difficult to overlook and it was tempting to imagine the richest of the rich in some obscure wing of the White House, his face buried in a velveteen sofa bearing the presidential seal and the faint trace of scotch stains from the Johnson-Nixon era, wondering if he was no longer best in class.
The announcement also served to distract from the lingering fallout from the most controversial of the blitz of day one executive orders: Trump’s decision to grant a mass clemency to the January 6th prisoners.
Arguing that he was a ‘friend’ of police officers, Trump, in another freewheeling live-television press conference, defended the decision.
“You have murderers that aren’t charged all over – you take a look at what has gone in Philadelphia, what has gone off in LA. These people have already served years in prison and they have served them viciously – it’s been a disgusting prison, it’s horrible, it’s inhumane. You go to Portland where they rapped police officers, shot police officers and nothing happened to anybody. You go to Seattle where they took over a big chunk of the city and people died. Take a look at Minneapolis because I was there and if I didn’t bring in the national guard, that city wouldn’t exist today. People were killed and nobody went to jail.
“So, these people have been in jail for a long time and I made a decision to give a pardon, Joe Biden gave a pardon yesterday to a lot of criminals. And you should be asking that question: why did he give a pardon to all of these people that committed crimes? Why did he give a pardon to the J6 ‘unselect’ committee when they destroyed all documents that showed that they did what was wrong? Why did he give a pardon to his relatives?”
The mass pardon was roundly condemned by Democratic lawmakers and many of the police officers who defended and were, in many cases, injured defending the Capitol that day. “It wasn’t a surprise,” Daniel Hodges told CNN on Tuesday night. The DC officer was assaulted that day four years ago and worked at Trump’s inauguration on Monday. “This is what Trump campaigned on. The die was cast for this on November 5th, right? This is what the people voted for. And even though it wasn’t a surprise, it still hurt to see. Because these people were violent insurrectionists. They brutally attacked me and my colleagues. They wanted to stop the transfer of power. I don’t see why so many of them would deserve a pardon.”
In addition, Trump rescinded the secret service protection of John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned nemesis who has been the target of an Iranian assassination plot.
“We’re not going to provide security for people for the rest of their lives,” he said. “He’s a stupid guy.”
And then, a few minutes later, he was asked about the letter Joe Biden had left for him in the drawer of the Resolute Desk – another nod to tradition in this mixed-up era. Trump allowed that it was a really nice letter, which he had appreciated. “It was a little bit of an inspirational type of letter,” he said, pleased again as the first day of his second term drew to a close.
Many faces and many moods, all in one day.
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