American oligarchy begins as Trump makes billions while MAGA gets left out in the rain
In D.C. for the launch of Trump 47, the MAGA faithful got soaked as a once and future POTUS cashes in.
WASHINGTON — Trickle-down economics was never meant to be this literal.
As storm clouds gathered, the second coming of Donald Trump began in earnest around 34 hours before he formally took the oath as the 47th president of the United States, in the frigid 2:30 a.m. darkness of a Sunday morning. That’s when truck drivers and small business owners and retirees who’d descended on D.C. from all over America began lining up for a rally that wouldn’t happen until later in the afternoon.
By the time I arrived in the nation’s capital around midday, the soggy middle-class MAGA hardcore whose billionaire savior once called “the forgotten men and women of our country” snaked for at least a mile through the lobbyist-lined blocks that border the Capitol One Arena. And they’d been trickled on for hours by a Mother Nature improv-comedy show that interspersed steady drizzle with painful bursts of sleet or snow.
These were folks who’d spent thousands of hard-earned, non-refundable dollars to book flights from California or Tennessee to find hotel rooms under inauguration surge pricing to be here for Trump’s big party — but someone left the cake out in the rain.
The president-elect’s inaugural committee had raised a gobsmacking all-time record of at least $250 million from the grand poobahs of Silicon Valley and the U.S. auto industry. But then came the dubious decision — citing a cold-but-hardly-deadly forecast — to move Monday’s main event from the spacious National Mall to the Capitol’s cramped Rotunda, with only room for 1,000 or so elites. That left Sunday’s superfluous “victory rally” in a downtown hockey arena as the only thing anyone remembered to schedule for the forgotten men and women of our country.
“If I don’t get in here, what would I have done all day?” I overheard one frustrated man asking philosophically, as the rally was now an hour old and the endless line still kept making irrational right and left turns further away from the arena, like an Elon Musk self-driving Tesla that had been hacked by one of his infinite brood of kids.
As the man mused out loud, I watched a high school senior chug Pringles straight from the can before it all turned to soggy mush, as folks took more cash from their wallets to buy parkas they pulled — too late, it seemed — over waterlogged clothes and souvenir MAGA hats. Some Trump fans, driven no doubt by boredom, started arguments with the pro-Jesus man carrying a giant sign: “ASK ME WHY YOU DESERVE TO BURN IN HELL.”
By 4:30 p.m., after the steady mist turned into a sideways blizzard, a few hundred people (including your correspondent, who’d been turned down for press credentials) who’d given up on the Capital One Arena found themselves trapped behind barricades for 30 miserable minutes until a parade of sirens and six identical black SUVs raced past. One of them carried Trump — dry, allowed to move in a straight line, and no doubt celebrating his achievement of the most important thing in his 78 years on earth.
Not the presidency, silly...Trump has already done that. No, somewhere in the hours between 9 p.m. Friday night and late Sunday afternoon, when he raced past the faces of all those little people out there in the dark, the promise of Trump’s second term had made him one of the richest people on the planet, the exclamation point on American kleptocracy.
On Friday night — after the last honest regulators of the Biden administration had cleaned off their desks and packed their boxes — Trump announced a new cryptocurrency venture, and it was the kind that even many crypto mavens think is more than a little dodgy: a “meme coin,” showing Trump’s famous post-Butler shooting “fight, fight, fight” gesture. It’s a product created from thin air with zero inherent value other than the “brand” of its creator, and a fantasy that buyers can get rich before they dump the $TRUMP coin on some schnook who’s losing their life’s savings.
We don’t know if the $TRUMP crypto buyers are the kind of people who also wait 10 hours in a January downpour to pay tribute to their king, or foreign potentates seeking a legal (but...really?) way to bribe the new POTUS, whose business entities control 80% of the meme coin. An Axios report Sunday said that wild early trading sent the value of $TRUMP to a level that netted the incoming president — again, on paper, with complicated rules on cashing in — $56 billion; other reports suggested the number settled closer to just a mere $10 billion.
Either way, the meme coin is the most shocking monetization — and cheapening — of the White House in American history, pulled off in a brazen style that would impress Trump’s favorite billionaire strongman, Vladimir Putin. Proving yet again that history repeats as farce, returning first lady Melania Trump showed up Sunday with a meme coin of her own, again with a seeming billion-dollar payday.
This was the true meaning of Inauguration Weekend 2025: the kickoff of America’s Second Republic as an unregulated and utterly unrepentant oligarchy. As the masses struggled through the wet and swampy rat maze erected for them near Chinatown, they passed women in Texas cowboy hats and designer scarves and men in tuxedo tops, or even one chap I saw in a full-length mink coat, ducking into restaurants where lobbyists and tech dudes drank dry martinis and avoided the deluge.
The 220,000 inauguration tickets that had been doled out to regular folks were utterly worthless. The only passes that mattered now were the ones that got you into the Trump Inauguration Candlelight Dinner, where the world’s two richest men, Musk and Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos hobnobbed with the Trump family, or on board a Potomac-moored yacht called The Liberty, where an intrepid New York Times reporter found the likely future Medicare chief Mehmet Oz hobnobbing with shadowy security consultants, the president of Paraguay, and an espresso-martini sipping woman who billed this “an assemblage of the future 1 percent.”
It turns out the Trump imperial model of bread and circuses means the crypto dudes are hoarding all the brioche, leaving the 99% with just a circus, which is why the president-elect even bothered to stage Sunday’s seemingly redundant victory rally.
Still, the rain, the slog and other things did inspire a spirit of camaraderie among those who’d spent all that money to storm and overtake a blue bastion of the East Coast for three days. It was their coming-out party for the end of the “wokeness” that these almost all white Trump superfans kept telling me had repressed them for the last four years. I took soggy notes as they hailed Trump’s plan to yank immigrants from cities they’d only seen on Fox News or end DEI mandates at their workplaces where somehow they’d managed to get ahead despite their whiteness.
» READ MORE: After 248 years, America prepares for life under a king
A middle-aged man with a touch of grey in his beard and a 2016 flirtation with left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders in his pre-Trump past told me he couldn’t give me his name because of his job with the Air Force in southern Virginia. But he had a lot to say about how DEI had ruined the military to the point where he’d told his “blue-eyed, blonde-haired” son not to enlist — but now Trump’s election has changed everything. “The spirit in my office has shifted dramatically,” he proclaimed, as a spontaneous chant of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” broke out down the block.
“Everything’s out of control now — crime, immigration, it’s a clown show”, said 18-year-old Stone Higgins, who was in grade school during Trump’s first presidency and came down with two friends from Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., the 18th richest suburb in America. ”I think we have to do ICE raids. We let 20 million people in and we have no idea where these people came from. These people don’t even come from Mexico — they come from places way further than Mexico...We’ve got to get these people out.”
When Trump finally took the stage at the Capitol One Arena around 5:15 p.m., he gave his fans like Higgins the post-Festivus airing of grievances they wanted, even if it came wrapped in a package of over-the-top lies (no, Trump did not win the youth vote by 36%...he lost it) and tired greatest hits. He did expound on his plans to abolish DEI and to turn more than 1 million transgender Americans into second-class citizens. But he got his biggest cheers when he proclaimed: “We will stop illegal immigration once and for all. We will not be invaded. We will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered.”
Trump did allow one speaker to occupy his podium for several minutes: Musk, the $450 billion man who came up with a 4-year-old son named X and giggled through his brief remarks that promised America “significant changes.” The details of those changes — lowering taxes for Musk and other billionaires, new rules for crypto gone wild, and various emolument schemes — stayed for now onboard the luxury yachts where they were being privately hatched.
With 100 or so other drying-out Trumpists, I’d retreated to watch this spectacle not from the stands but the bar at Gordon Ramsey’s Street Pizza down the street. None whooped louder than the man behind me wearing a Trump scarf who later told me he was Angelo Casillas, a 59-year-old truck driver who’d flown 3,000 miles from Sacramento to end up watching Trump on this bar TV.
Casillas, whose family came from Mexico over a century ago, has no problem with deporting today’s migrants — “Get them out!” — but is deeply troubled by “DEI, which is crazy” and which he somehow connects with what he’s heard about transgender youth, that “kids are taking (hormone) pills at 8 years old,” although he doesn’t know any personally." As we spoke, Trump was up on the big screen doing his herky-jerky dance to the 1970s gay anthem “Y.M.C.A.” along with an apostate lead singer of the Village People and his rented faux cop and construction worker, about to assume king-like powers in a nation where nothing makes sense anymore.
At noon Monday, Trump will again recite the oath of office, and country singer Lee Greenwood, who performed at the rally, told Fox News he hopes and expects the 47th president will do so on a new, 5,000-copy limited edition of their $59.99 God Bless the USA Bible, on sale now. Is this a great country, or what?
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