At the end of his first campaign, now-President Trump promised to tear the system down. For all the promises he’s broken, it’s worth giving credit where it’s due: that pledge rings truer than ever.
Trump has put forward a laundry list of unqualified cabinet nominees expected to be confirmed by a groveling Republican Senate, threats to sic law enforcement on political rivals have come from his pen and his podium, and the reader of his oath of office is the same Chief Justice who ruled the president immune from prosecution.
In all this, it’s difficult not to view President Donald Trump’s swearing-in as less inauguration and more coronation.
This distance from the status quo would have been made all the more apparent by a symbolic parting gift of sorts from deceased President Jimmy Carter: since Carter died within 30 days of the 20th, tradition would have it that the flags would be at half mast—fitting for a country half in mourning, in this case.
Before the inauguration, Trump had hinted on Truth Social that he’d move to bring the flags to full staff for that one day. When former president Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean Pierre, was asked if this was possible, she answered with what may have been the last major use of Biden’s power: “no.” House Speaker Mike Johnson later announced that they would be brought up for the inauguration, and then lowered later in the day.
If it were any other inauguration, grieving a newly late president would have been reason enough for this decision to be absurd. But Trump’s case is special, and Pierre was even more right to be defiant.
With the technology industry creating revolutionary artificial intelligences and social media companies tightening their grip on American life, changing the world has become something of a sales pitch. Trump challenges this worship of novelty—he’s unprecedented in all the wrong ways.
Many people have given a few cliched reasons for that, and they’re right. It’s true that Trump’s felony convictions, liability for sexual assault, contempt for the press, climate change denial, disastrous friendship with Elon Musk, and fast-and-loose relationship with accepting election results should bewilder everyone. But there are more subtly dangerous aspects of the 47th President’s vision for America, bureaucratic promises that haven’t gotten half of the press attention they deserve and should bring ever more shame on this new administration.
These range from Schedule F—a part of Project 2025 devoted to increasing the number of federal employees loyal to the president from 4,000 to 54,000—to slashing agencies devoted to climate regulation like the Environmental Protection Agency in the name of government efficiency. While these proposals—and the many others like them—are catastrophic, there’s meager consolation in the fact that most of them (excepting the environment, of course) do not wreak irreversible harm on our institutions or our future. But changes to education do.
The glamorous horror show of Linda McMahon, wrestling industry empress and Trump’s woefully unqualified pick to lead the Department of Education, has gotten plenty of attention, but not enough has gone to the fact that she may soon be out of a job. Under Trump’s plan to eliminate the department, standards for instruction would be left entirely to the states, and the quality of schooling that students receive would vary even more wildly than it already does.
Trump has also advocated for school choice vouchers, which ransack public schools’ budgets to benefit a small minority of students. Trump’s contempt for education—and, by extension, for the people he’s supposed to lead—couldn’t be more obvious.
Four years before Trump took his oath on Monday, when Biden spoke to a masked crowd, there was heightened security throughout Washington, D.C. Just two weeks earlier, on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump incited a mob to attack the Capitol and stop the confirmation of Biden’s victory.
On Jan. 6, 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris gracefully confirmed her own defeat, and not a window was broken. This is the administration we’ve abandoned.
The next four years are going to be chaotic in some ways and poisonously efficient in others, and our standards for what makes an effective administration will be tested, but they cannot slip. None of this is normal. We shouldn’t act like it is. I don’t know what the future holds, but with everything we’ve seen about our new president, I’d predict that much of it will be well worth a flag at half mast.
