On Monday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated for his second term as US president, bringing with him a whole bevy of MAGA extremists, tech-bro disruptors and a defence secretary who’s been denounced by his own mother. The hyperpower is on course to be ruled by an administration whose best members can be described by the “marginally more normal” label of “traditional Republicans”.
We knew this was coming, of course – have had ten weeks to get used to it – but there are some things one can’t really prepare for, and it turns out that “wondering each morning whether the US president is joking about his desire to just absorb someone else’s sovereign territory” is one of them. Apart from anything else, we’ve been here before, and history is not meant to go into reverse like this.
Content from our partners
