I feel like I’ve been watching two different presidential transitions take place. There’s been the official one, with all of its pomp and its pageantry. The one we call the peaceful transition of power. The state of the vote for the President of the United States. I watched Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the election. She lost. I watched President Joe Biden welcome his successor, President Donald Trump, back to the White House. The honorable William J. Clinton I watched every living former president assemble under the Capitol rotunda to honor Trump’s second inauguration. What a difference this inauguration was to four years ago, when a mob had just stormed the Capitol. When Trump sought to append the election results and upon failing, did not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. This transition, the official transition of presidential power, has been orderly. But there has been this other transition happening to a transition not of power, but of political system, a transition in the rules and expectations of power. There’s breaking news from the White House tonight. President Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden. For months, the president insisted he would not do. The blowback is certainly coming from all directions for President Biden. And it isn’t just Republicans that are crying hypocrisy. I understood Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden. Hunter had become a particular fixation of the Trumpist right. Hunter Biden is guilty of human sex trafficking, and we have the receipts, Mr Biden, and the idea that they would unleash their revenge on him individually seemed all too real. Joe Biden has already lost two children. Others may disagree. I had trouble begrudging him his refusal to lose a third. President Biden leaves the White House with a flurry of 11th hour pardons. But then came so many more pardons, culminating in pardons of Anthony Fauci and much of Biden’s family. It’s going to set a terrible precedent. And it wasn’t just pardons. There was the refusal to enforce the ban on TikTok that Biden himself had signed into law. And alongside that came the bizarre decision to announce that the equal Rights Amendment was now ratified, as Virginia had accepted it in 2020, becoming the 38th state to do so. Today, I affirm the equal Rights Amendment to have cleared all the necessary hurdles to be added to the US Constitution. Now, the equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land Now. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t ratified. Congress had set a deadline of 1982 for ratification. The opinion of Biden’s own Justice Department is that Virginia’s late act is meaningless. The era is not ratified, and the Biden administration knows it’s not ratified. All this was just an effort to make the president seem more powerful, more consequential than he really was. And why did it wait until the final days of his presidency. Changing the Constitution under a controversial theory is not what you do on your way out the door. The Biden of 2020 would have done none of this in key cases like the family pardons. He said he would not do this, and then he did it. This feels, in its own way Biden’s submission to the new regime. The powers of the presidency are whatever the president can get away with. I’m not naive. I recognize that presidents have been testing the limits of their authority since the dawn of the Republic. But for a president like Biden, whose core message was about the preservation of America’s constitutional democracy, and not just that, but the informal system of norms and values and behaviors that scaffolds that system. But for that President to leave in this way was a profound statement of its own. Maybe the message was cynicism. Maybe it was acceptance because it is clear that things are to be done differently now. The beginning of Donald Trump’s second term certainly revealed a president who intends to govern based on what he can get away with. Trump announced immediately that he was declaring birthright citizenship invalid, unilaterally changing the clear language of the Constitution and daring the courts to stop him. He’s giving TikTok a reprieve from the clean language of the law, so he can figure out a way to save it. He is pardoning the January 6 rioters. He’s renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America, and Denali to be Mount McKinley. I was struck in Trump’s inaugural address how almost everything mentioned was an executive action that Trump would take and the courts would decide to accept or reject. He talked little of laws. He wanted to persuade Congress to pass. What interest Trump is, what he can do alone. And watching Trump take the oath of office from the good seats were the CEOs of the major platforms who control America’s attention. There was Elon Musk, the owner of X and Tesla Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of alphabet. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. And a bit further back was, the CEO of TikTok. For all Trump’s talk of manufacturing jobs and auto plants and infrastructure, the CEOs of GM and GE and Ford and Caterpillar were not in that room. This wasn’t just an assemblage of America’s rich. It was our intentional oligarchy assembled before Trump. All this came just days after the Trump family launched a crypto coin in their own name a meme coin, you can’t spend it. It’s just a way to invest in Trump’s fortunes. To invest in Trump. To make him richer. The meme coin shot to more than $70, and the Trump family and its partners seem to own about 80 percent of the coins, making their holdings worth notionally tens of billions of dollars. And then Melania Trump. She launched her own meme coin, which also shot up, although it seemed to harm the value of the Trump meme coin. This is all insane to even try to describe. But Melania’s meme coin comes after she sold her biopic and another project she’s an executive producer on both to Amazon for $40 million. The scale of the graph and the grift right now is astonishing, and it’s all out in the open. It’s not like politics is free of corruption in 2018 or 2022. But this is a new era of brazenness, of cashing in on power. And who’s going to stop Trump and his family. Who’s going to tell them no. We talk about America’s system of government as if it is a solid thing bound by the Constitution and institutions, the way a belt cinches around a waist. But it’s really just a pile of norms in a trench coat. Knock the norms down and everything changes. I can imagine what we’re seeing, leading to backlash. I don’t think it’s safe. I don’t think it’s good politics to rub America’s face in this much oligarchy and corruption. I could also see it leading to a consolidation of power as Trump and his allies unite to protect their power, unite to help each other, as has happened in so many other countries. But we are either way entering a new era. Power did not just pass from one president to another. It passed from one regime to another, one set of rules to another. And you can see it. So clearly because the old regime ended even before the new one began.
