Paul Murray: US politics full of empty threats or promises? For Donald Trump it really doesn’t matter

The world ended around midday Tuesday, eastern American time.

That was the only conclusion to be drawn from watching the inauguration of Donald Trump on American cable networks MSNBC and CNN.

The mood of their presenters was not just dire — it was desperate. Everything they stood for was being dismantled. American democracy was over, apparently.

A new authoritarianism, backed by the tech oligarchs they had previously lionised, would enslave the citizens of the United States who had recklessly put their faith in a man they so clearly despised.

The fear and loathing in the media Left was tangible. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was close to tears for her whole segment. Her colleague, Chris Hayes, raged against the dying of the Democratic light. Stephanie Ruhle talked darkly of The Resistance ahead.

It was great television.

I’ll have to admit to a guilty secret. Since the November election, I’ve taken to watching MSNBC regularly for entertainment. I enjoy their coverage of Trump’s second presidency much more than the rabidly-supportive Fox News.

MSNBC’s hosts have been apopleptic and encouragingly show no signs of recovery. Their commentary is so dour, so blinkered and so very pretentious that it becomes addictive. Perversely.

It’s like a child picking at scabs on a wound. You know it must hurt — and their mothers probably told them not to — but they just can’t stop.

What they fear the most is that, unlike many recent presidents, Trump carries out his election promises.

No wonder MSNBC’s owner, Comcast, announced it had decided to sell the channel. “Since election day, MSNBC has averaged about 521,000 viewers, a 38 per cent decrease from its 2024 average before 5 November,” the Guardian reported.

What is rarely heard on CSNBC and CNN is that Trump won the electoral college vote by 312-226, a comfortable margin. He was only 20 college votes short of Barack Obama’s victory in 2012 and got six more than Joe Biden in 2020.

Trump also won the popular ballot this time by 77.28m votes to 74.99. What’s not democratic about that outcome?

The New York Post reported in late November that CNN had lost an average 413,000 viewers since the election, a 22 per cent fall. Trump fatigue has set in at the Democrat echo chambers.

“Meanwhile, at Fox News, the audience continues to grow in the weeks after the election,” the Post noted. “The network’s total day audience jumped 38 per cent and its primetime audience grew 21 per cent.”

This is just another sign of Trump reshaping America, bulldozing the social, political and media landscapes. And he’s only got one term in which to do it, despite lunatic fears he intends to stay in the Oval Office forever.

Trump is a homespun psychologist in a buffoon’s disguise. His most powerful instinct is to mess with people’s heads, both his opponents and his supporters.

He loves disrupting norms. And hyperbole. He also likes being the only person who knows what he will do while forcing everyone else down rabbit holes.

Trump clearly doesn’t play by the established rules of politics, so it’s not smart for the media to expect him to. Or to measure him against redundant paradigms.

His verbose threats have a way of creating action by others even before he does anything. Whether or not he would have carried through on the threat is moot.

Trump’s psychology is to get under his opponents’ skin, into their heads and make them lose rationality.

His inauguration speech was a case in point. It was graceless, provocative and brimming with resentment, fuelled by rancour about his treatment at the hands of the Democrats over the previous eight years.

We should remember that Democratic Party leaders began plotting Trump’s first impeachment even before he assumed the presidency in 2017.

So with the outgoing president and his most-recently vanquished rival sitting at his shoulder for his second inauguration, he accused both of “a horrible betrayal” of the American people.

“As we gather today, our government confronts a crisis of trust,” Trump said. “For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.

“We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad.

“It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions, that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.”

By that time, Trump knew about Biden’s last-minute pardons for his three siblings and two of their partners, having already removed his crooked son Hunter from further criminal prosecution.

The wording was particularly galling, given Biden’s relentless congressional and legal pursuit of Trump, mainly on spurious grounds.

“Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances,” Biden said in the presidential order protecting his family members and political associates, like “the father of Covid”, Anthony Fauci.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University, didn’t disguise his outrage, claiming Biden had “repeatedly lied about the influence peddling” that enriched his family.

“With only 15 minutes to go as president, Joe Biden snatched infamy from the jaws of obscurity,” Turley wrote for online political news site, The Hill. “With record-low polling and widely viewed as a ‘failed’ president, Biden completed his one-man race to the bottom of ethics by issuing pre-emptive pardons to members of his own family.

“The pardons were timed to guarantee that the media would not focus on yet another unethical act by this president. He need not have worried. For four years, the media worked tirelessly to deny or deflect the corruption scandal surrounding the Biden family.”

Consider the Biden family’s self-evident corruption that requires a blanket pardon compared to the victimless crime which allows Trump’s enemies to call him a convicted felon.

Trump wasn’t prosecuted for paying hush money to stop porn star Stormy Daniels telling tales about him, as many people think. That’s not an offence. The offence which a partisan Democrat prosecutor notoriously contrived to criminalise was a book-keeping misdemeanour about how the payments were recorded.

But Trump does deserve condemnation for his own day one tsunami of pardons and sentence commutations.

His biggest mistake so far was to pardon so many of the January 6 mob. He knows that the worst of them were not supporters, but a crazy mishmash of anarchic misfits.

Trump cannot credibly say he stands for the rule of law while excusing such violent extremism.

The MAGA movement is a revolution and Trump has blindly rewarded the revolutionary zeal that thrust him back into power with a mandate that terrifies his opponents.

Just before the election, opinion polls showed only around 30 per cent of voters believed the country was headed in the right direction. The new direction might make the other 70 per cent giddy.

It’s not just despots in China, Russia and North Korea who are quaking in their boots about the second incarnation of Trump.

The fear and loathing is as extreme in California, once part of Mexico and now wanting to be anything but part of the United States of America as its Democratic Party rulers sweat on Trump’s final fling.

While the wildfires were licking at the homes of wealthy Democrats earlier this month, California’s lawmakers met in a special session in Sacramento, not to address the catastrophe and the insurance crisis it sparked, but to set aside $50 million for legal challenges against Trump.

“This is tone deaf,” Republican State Senator Brian Jones said. “Focusing on suing the administration that hasn’t even done anything yet in the midst of a catastrophic wildfire in LA. We shouldn’t be Trump-proofing California. We should be focusing on fireproofing California.”

The man touted to replace former Speaker and Trump hater-in-chief, Nancy Pelosi, California’s State Senate budget chair, the appropriately-named Scott Wiener, was unapologetic.

“This funding agreement cements California’s readiness to serve as a bulwark against Trump’s extremist agenda.” Wiener said, noting $25 million was to defend undocumented immigrants against deportation.

Why? Where’s his mandate?

Meanwhile, India has proactively identified at least 18,000 of its citizens living illegally in the US — the real number could be closer to 700,000, the third biggest cohort after Mexicans and Salvadorans – which it says it will repatriate.

Why? So that Trump doesn’t shut a US skilled migrant visa scheme which is 75 per cent filled by Indians, around 200,000 a year.

Once again, Trump didn’t have to take action. Just let it be known that he might.

And, bit by bit, a new order is established.