The emperor returns for an inauguration spectacle
National Post, 19 January 2025
Trump's Jan. 20 swearing-in will be followed by the U.S. college football championship in the evening. Both will surely feature excess
It will be a January 20th unlike any other. At midday the new president will be inaugurated. In the evening, the national college football championship will be played. On a single day America will bloom in the full flower of late imperial excess.
It’s been 20 years since Niall Ferguson published Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, a masterful account of “an empire with attention deficit disorder.” He wrote it before Facebook became common, the smartphone ubiquitous, social media contagious and Donald Trump omnipresent.
The emperor returns. His billionaire populism comes this time with a certain acquisitive hunger — for Greenland, for the Panama Canal, for all of Canada. Call it empire-building isolationism.
His command is unchallenged. Republicans have demonstrated their fealty in Congress. Foreign leaders have made their abasement visits to Mar-a-Lago. The titans of tech have paid their tribute and will sit together at the Capitol. Will there be a luxury box?
Alongside Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will be TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Trump was in favour of banning TikTok until he was against it, and the interests of his billionaire backers appear to have been determinative.
The spectacle on Monday ought to provide clarity for the Canadians in attendance, including Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Alberta is not Saudi Arabia, but perhaps the simplest — and cheapest — way to deal with Trump’s tariff threat is to “invest,” Saudi style, $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. The fund makes no returns, but charges hefty fees. It’s possible that foreign powers think that they are buying something else from Trump’s son-in-law.
Republics are meant to elevate virtue; imperial expansion is the consequence of a well-ordered commonweal. Success brings the danger of overreach abroad and dissipation at home. Late imperial decadence sets in when the trappings of success are enjoyed but the sacrifices necessary to sustain them are no longer made. Ideals give way to interests.
Consider the Village People. Their song, YMCA, a 1970s gay anthem, has become Trump’s rally-closing song. Victor Willis, songwriter and singer, announced, as many liberal artists did, that he did not want Trump using his song. Then he changed his mind.
“The financial benefits have been great,” Willis said last month with admirable simplicity. “YMCA is estimated to gross several million dollars since the president-elect’s continued use of the song. … And I thank him for choosing to use my song.”
Would that others could be so direct.
In 2009, Aretha Franklin was the undisputed star of Barack Obama’s first inauguration, singing My Country ‘Tis of Thee. The Village People will be on hand in Washington for Trump’s ancillary celebrations. One does not need Niall Ferguson to demonstrate that decline.
Imperial decline includes circuses, and nowhere is the excess more evident that at the college football championship, to be played Monday night in Atlanta. The Super Bowl is bigger still, but has from the beginning been a vulgar commercial proposition.
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