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On January 20, 2025, Everyone in America Lost
Your vote will not protect you.
Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America, which unfortunately coincides with Inauguration Day this year. What’s worse, this year, 2025, Donald J. Trump will assume the office of President of the United States for the second time.
Right now, a lot of people are celebrating his ascent to power for the second time in the past decade. He won with a plurality of the vote, marking the first time that a Republican came out ahead of the Democratic candidate in total vote count since 2004, and only the second time since 1992. He still managed to not win a majority of votes, meaning that more people voted for someone other than him than voted for him.
That doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme, aside from the fact that he’s claiming a huge mandate to do whatever he wants when he doesn’t really have one. His electoral college margin was slimmer than most in the past few decades, and while Republicans won a majority of both chambers of congress, that majority in the House of Representatives is vanishingly small.
Still, he’s got control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government, and the Supreme Court has shown an incredible willingness to give Trump whatever he wants — mostly, anyway. Basically, he’s got a blank check to do what he wants for at least two years.
Strap in, because we’re all going to lose here.
The inauguration took place indoors due (ostensibly) to cold temperatures, and the assorted huge screens to broadcast said inauguration were apparently taken down at the behest of the. This wound up screwing a bunch of MAGA faithful, who had anticipated a big rally to celebrate the ascent of their god-emperor, out of the cost of tickets and hotels.
By and large, a lot of people were left out of the Capitol Rotunda, including a lot of Trump-friendly governors like Ron DeSantis. If Ron DeSantis can’t get a seat in the room where it happened, you have to wonder who was in there. Who took precedence over the numerous Republican sycophants who helped Trump win a second term?
The billionaires, of course. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and their spouses got prime seats and top billing…
