Thy Gold Refine

Trump’s Second Inaugural and the Politics of the American Future

Donald Trump takes the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States, January 20, 2025 (Credit: Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies)

On January 20th, Donald Trump declared something that, if realized, will be even more significant than his own inauguration: the beginning of “the Golden Age of America.”¹ This declaration might be fairly said to be a new articulation of his long-standing political goal of making America great again. But it is worth dwelling on this idea in its own right, because it offers, finally, a concretization of that now-famous slogan. Gone are the days of “American carnage,” both in fact and in rhetoric, and the golden age suggests a more substantive vision than the mere restoration of civil peace.² The America Trump describes will not be satisfied with anything short of glory.

Typically, the term “golden age” refers to the period during which a culture—or a country, or a genre—is at its apogee, when it most fully and most beautifully expresses itself. The Elizabethan Era, for instance, saw something of a resolution to England’s religious strife, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the first serious English attempts to explore the New World. Most importantly, the period was distinguished not only by the works of Shakespeare but also by those of such luminaries as Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson. It is this cultural element that helps distinguish such times from other periods of prosperity and peace, and that this term typically refers to culture helps explain the composition of Trump’s inaugural. We heard, as has always been typical of the form, a reiteration of some of the core components of the president’s platform, such as an end to the political weaponization of the justice system, increased enforcement of immigration policy, and so on. But we also got—in larger letters—a depiction of the kind of nation Trump and his advisors want to govern. America, he said, will once again command the world’s respect. More than that, she will be “proud, prosperous, and free”; she will again be a “growing nation” endowed with the “courage, vigor, and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization.” This isn’t a policy platform by any means. It is a self-image according to which policy can be judged. It is the first draft of our great-grandchildren’s history books.

In analyzing this image, it is necessary to note that it is only workable because America has had no generally accepted Golden Age before. One contender, the Roaring Twenties, fell short because it was too self-critical—see the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald—to symbolize American excellence. Additionally, despite the careful and principled stewardship of Calvin Coolidge, he left us without the enduring political developments typically characteristic of such a fully-flourishing culture. For its part, the ‘Gilded Age’ was similarly defined for us by men who could not bear its excesses; its very name is an acerbic parody of the idea to which Trump appealed. Of greater significance than even the self-criticism of the scholars and litterateurs responsible for authoring our national autobiographies was our domineering belief in Progress. Americans of old could not have declared a Golden Age without admitting that still better times were not necessarily around the corner. To reach a peak is to look around oneself and see only the possibility of decline.

Trump’s evocation of a golden age was not, however, so much a declaration of something which already exists as it was instead a call to action. But in recognizing that things will not get better on their own, Trump is a more honest dealer than those who believe that History cannot do without the United States of America. Marco Rubio was entirely correct to call the grandees of the Biden Administration “the polite and orderly caretakers of American decline,” because the belief that our success is guaranteed is too great of a temptation to stop actively working toward it.³ The vision of the Trump Administration is a response to America’s loss of infinite self-confidence, not its cause. But it offers us a chance. It suggests that even if our ascension isn’t assured, it is still achievable—and in recognizing the uncertain nature of our destiny, it is well-suited to be the impetus we need to start building that more beautiful future. We do not today, even if we someday might, weep with Alexander that there are no worlds left to conquer. That privilege belongs to our great-grandchildren, not us. It is the reward for a glory we have not yet achieved.

To answer this call to action, it is necessary to coalesce the character traits of the America depicted in Trump’s inaugural into a more specific set of goals that mediate between inspiration and policy. Cultural output is not, by and large, directly susceptible to policy, but the conditions for a ‘courageous, vigorous, vital’ culture can be influenced through political means. The first measure must be the reconstruction of high social trust. The modern decline of such trust has been commented on almost too frequently to bear repeating. It can be seen in locked doors that once hung open, in empty city sidewalks that once were full, and in house-bound children who once would have roamed free. Without such trust, wide-scale cooperation between citizens becomes impossible. More fundamentally, men governed primarily by fear rarely do things of which their grandchildren can be proud. No better description of such people has been provided than that of Thomas Hobbes and his “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” lives. Even a man strong enough to keep himself safe in such a country would, lacking friendship and brotherhood, be incapable of living the good life. If such a society could manage to do great things, they would be grotesqueries, reflecting, as they must, the souls warped by the means of their production. The surveillance system of the Chinese state is, one must admit, impressive, but it is not the mark of a healthy society. A society in which a man cannot trust his neighbor will not long be worthy of the name, because that trust undergirds all the other bonds which unite a people—affection, duty, patriotism, piety—except raw power.

Fortunately, most Americans are still basically good people, at least in the civic sense. We have deprived ourselves of some of the supports of good character on which our ancestors relied, and we no longer have their instinctive aversions to certain corruptions, but we are not yet Kant’s ‘republic of devils.’ This means that the restoration of these civic bonds is eminently possible. The state should, therefore, encourage moral formation where it can, reliably punish criminality where it cannot, and encourage a revival of the practices of community life. These goals could give rise to a wide variety of specific policies—indeed, we might use our federalist system to try many of them at once—but some of the Trump Administration’s initial plans fit the bill. An increased focus on law enforcement is one. Increasing deportation rates for illegal immigrants, who cannot be expected to abide by the unspoken civic norms that underlie American community life, is another.

But high social trust alone is not a prescription for national greatness. A great many communities have enjoyed civic peace without so much as scratching the surface of History. The American Union at its best is not “unity without content.” People must feel—and they must feel it because it is actually true—that they are personally contributing to a cause greater than themselves. This second primary goal—the collective pursuit of glory—can take many forms, but must clearly rely in some way on individual participation. Our history is replete with such causes, beginning with the establishment of what its founders hoped would be a uniquely godly covenantal nation in New England in the early seventeenth century. Our great wars have served this function, especially when victory had a clear moral dimension. The Union itself began as the product of such an endeavor in 1774, when the Articles of Association required every American to refrain from importing goods from Britain or exporting to it. The space program, for its part, shows the limits of this kind of project. The moon landing, for instance, was surely great, but its reliance on mass participation was mostly consigned to funding from the taxpayer and a diffuse increase in popular science education. Had it not been embedded in the wider struggle of the Cold War, it may not have been seen as a collective accomplishment so much as the byproduct of a few particularly fertile minds. Americans are a curious sort of people in this way—even as our moral standards waver and decay, we are not satisfied unless we believe we are personally helping to build a better world.

On the face of it, this prescription seems politically risky, if not suicidal. It amounts, after all, to asking Americans to offer up some of their freedom and prosperity to a mission only tenuously connected to their own well-being. Indeed, we have responded best to those causes which, like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, also had a clear and direct impact on our futures. This concern is particularly salient today given that our most recent round of moral crusading, in the mountains of Afghanistan, ended to no one’s clear benefit, much less our own. It may therefore be tempting to leave this task up to some non-governmental group, to pray, for instance, for another Great Awakening instead of engaging in political life. But while religious or cultural movements could plausibly build a vibrant society, we are concerned here specifically with public policy. Moreover, the Golden Age should not be limited to one corner of society and, as things stand, little unites us all today besides the state.

Furthermore, when we remember that America is not just a collection of people alive today but instead an intergenerational polity, the idea of avoiding sacrifice entirely becomes absurd. As Machiavelli recognized, states cannot exist in stasis. Either we grow or we die. Either we sacrifice now for our future benefit or we mortgage the future to meet today’s desires. Again, it is not true that any moral crusade will do, or that our leaders can ignore prudential concerns when identifying a grand goal to which we may aspire. But to make the sacrifices which our current situation demands of us palatable, we will need a legible narrative of this kind. That mission need not be messianic or universalist—it can be focused just on what is good for Americans—but it must define that good as something more than prosperity or safety.

Those of us who wish to see a Golden America now need to define this mission. The inaugural provided this vision, and it described many worthwhile policies, but it did not ask much from us. Our need to maintain our dominant global position against a rising China—and reconstruct our domestic economy accordingly—seems to me to be the most plausible option in our time, but there are others. Whether this vision is articulated by Trump himself or emerges as a common cultural consensus, it will form a virtuous cycle with social trust: proving that we can cooperate will spur on yet more mutually beneficial activity. That cycle will also attach more meaning to the everyday lives of Americans as the significance of our actions grows beyond our own small worlds. While we still cannot guarantee great cultural production in this way, mass movements toward new (or revived) forms of social organization tend to carry along great works in their wake. Trump’s initial campaign woke Americans up to the possibility of engaging in a deeper form of politics than the technocratic quibbling that had preceded it. His second inaugural has now given a clearer sense of what a great America would look like. Now, we must decide what we are willing to do to get there.

XENOPHON

A version of this article originally appeared in Patriot Dreams, the May 2025 print issue of the Salient.

1. “Transcript: Read Trump’s Full Second Inaugural Address,” PBS News, January 20, 2025.

2. “The Inaugural Address,” The White House.

3. “Rubio Calls Biden’s National Security Team ‘Polite & Orderly Caretakers of America’s Decline,’” Politico.