Americans really do inhabit two worlds: some shed tears of sadness at the advent of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Others cried, too – with joy.
Across the conservative, “post-liberal” and alternative media spheres, journalists, pundits and some social media circles celebrated the end of the Biden era with the enthusiasm of rebels toppling the relics of a collapsing dictatorship. As Trump swore his presidential oath, the writer Walter Kirn, a pro-Trump, anti-establishment agitator on X, grandiloquently declared: “This is a revolution against a corrupt ancien regime.”
That sentiment was widely shared, with rightwing pundits framing Trump’s inauguration as “regime change” and “revolutionary” and mocking the “panic attacks” of liberal late-night hosts and MSNBC anchors. The conservative City Journal described Trump’s inauguration as “exhilarating”, arguing it was “safe to be a white male again” (while also criticizing Trump’s speech for failing to offer “any gestures of reconciliation toward the previous administration”).
Some commentators triumphantly proclaimed Trump’s return part of a broader rightwing populist sweep across the world. A New York Post op-ed a couple of days before inauguration argued that Trump’s “smashing victory is inspiring conservative parties in Canada, Europe and elsewhere to get off the mat and fight to reverse their countries’ progressive slide into oblivion”. The Liberal party in Canada is expected to suffer a cratering loss to the Conservatives this year.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salute-like hand gesture received scant coverage on the right, with most outlets either not covering it, dismissing it as meaningless, or sharing memes with examples of Democratic politicians making similar gestures. (Musk has mocked the suggestion that it was a Nazi salute, without apologizing; the Anti-Defamation League immediately issued a statement defending him, before backtracking as Musk began making Nazi puns on X.)
But there were some cracks visible on the right.
After Trump announced that he was cancelling the flights of 1,600 Afghan refugees – including families whose lives are endangered because they worked with the US occupation – Jay Nordlinger, a conservative journalist, remarked on X: “In August 2021, a lot of Republicans said we had betrayed the Afghans. What will they say now?”
A commenter replied: “Not a damn thing, to our everlasting shame.”
Trump’s decision to launch a “$Trump” cryptocurrency three days before taking office was polarizing, with some posters on conservative and cryptocurrency Reddit forums comparing it to a “pump-and-dump” scheme. Unhappy Maga enthusiasts online called the meme coin “ridiculous”, an “L” (loss), and no different from encouraging “gambling addiction”.
On the other hand, conservatives reacted mostly with rapture to Trump’s flurry of week-one orders dismantling DEI and affirmative action, declaring an emergency at the southern border, attempting to end birthright citizenship, and withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization.
Trump’s decision to commute the sentences of or pardon 1,500 January 6 rioters – some of whom attacked police officers – was widely lauded, with the convictions dismissed as overzealous. The amnesty was “the end of a prosecutorial nightmare”, BlazeMedia declared.
Fox News devoted a number of segments and articles this week to shadowing the Ice raids that have already arrested hundreds of migrants. The coverage emphasized the arrests of sex offenders, alleged gang members and people with long rap sheets, as well as a looming confrontation between the federal government and “sanctuary cities” that have vowed not to cooperate with immigration authorities.
Conservative coverage argued that even residents of liberal cities support the raids. Recent New York Times polling suggests that 44% of Democrats support deporting undocumented migrants who arrived during the Biden administration, though polling shows less support for mass deportations if they separate families or expel people long in America.
Conservative outlets have also been closely following the shooting death of a federal border agent near the Canadian border and a shooting attack on hikers in southern California that the US border patrol says was committed by Mexican cartel scouts.
Some were less happy with Trump’s move to restore TikTok, however. The conservative Jewish magazine Tablet described a “danger that the combination of TikTok’s popularity, the president’s deal-making instincts, and the interests of some of his donors will make ‘saving’ TikTok – and thus providing a foreign adversary with a propaganda ray aimed squarely at the minds of more than 170 million Americans – seem like a win-win arrangement”.
Meanwhile, an ugly recent debate over H-1B foreign-worker visas – which caused a schism between the “Silicon Valley” faction of the pro-Trump right, who favor these visas, and populist Maga nationalists, who loathe them – continues to reverberate. Steve Bannon, of the latter camp, is using podcast and media appearances to repeatedly accuse Musk and other tech “oligarchs” of a malign influence on Trump.
For now, the conservative media sphere is overjoyed at Trump’s second coming – but the internal tensions of his new coalition may still bubble over.
English (US)