On Monday, I spent my day off watching the coverage of Donald Trump’s second inauguration. I cannot possibly explain why I chose to do this. His first inaugural address was about “American carnage” and his speeches have only gotten darker since then. In recent weeks, he’s become obsessed with expanding the territorial boundaries of the United States to include Canada and Greenland as well as reclaiming the Panama Canal. Needless to say, my expectations for the inauguration were not very high.
It did not meet my low expectations. One look at the stage in the Capitol Rotunda made that clear. While Republican governors were watching on TV screens in a different room of the Capitol, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were given better seats than the incoming cabinet members. Trump’s speech itself was not quite “American carnage”, but it was close. It was full of lies and insults about Biden’s record while Biden listened. His speech to the overflow room in Emancipation Hall was just more of the same things that he’s been saying on the campaign trail.
But the worst moment of the inauguration ceremonies did not come from Trump himself. Instead, it came from tech billionaire and “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) leader Elon Musk, who was the largest financial supporter of Trump’s campaign. Speaking to Trump’s supporters at Capital One Arena, Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. Twice. Then he told the crowd full of Trump supporters that “it is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured”.
Perhaps this is not surprising from Elon Musk. He made his fortune from emerald mines in apartheid-era South Africa. When he took over Twitter, the first thing that he did was to allow Nazis back onto the site. He’s even retweeted posts about Jews and the great replacement theory from some of these Nazis that he let onto the site. We should not be surprised that Musk is a Nazi.
What should surprise and also terrify us is the response to Musk’s Nazi salutes and his rhetoric. At first, I wasn’t sure what the most terrifying part of the response was. It could be the crowd of 20,000 people cheering and applauding the salute. Perhaps it could have been the neo-Nazis that flooded the internet with videos of them saluting him back. However, as the week went on, it became clear what was truly the most terrifying reaction of them all was not that of ordinary citizens or of fringe political groups still not accepted by the public, but that of certain leaders within both the Republican party and organizations within society at large.
Let’s start with Trump. He responded to one of the co-chairs of DOGE doing a Nazi salute at one of his rallies by removing one of the co-chairs of DOGE. Unfortunately, the DOGE co-chair that was removed was Vivek Raamaswamy, leaving Elon Musk in full control of…a department that doesn’t exist. But you get the point. It is not surprising that Trump is OK with having Nazis in his party. After all, he said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a 2017 Nazi rally and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate. Not a single congressional Republican has condemned the fact that one of most of the influential figures in their party did a Heil Hitler salute on live television. Elise Stefanik, who rose to national prominence for holding hearings on antisemitism, responded to a question from Senator Chris Murphy about the Nazi salute by saying that “no, Elon Musk did not do those salutes…Elon Musk is a visionary” and refused to answer a follow-up question. Even the Anti-Defamation League, which supposedly exists to combat antisemitism, called the salute an “awkward gesture” and tweeted that “in this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath”.
Democrats campaigned by warning that Donald Trump was a fascist. The majority of the voters ignored this warning. It gives me no pleasure to be able to say that “I told you so”. I wish we were wrong. Instead, as I watched a crowd of Americans cheer when they watched a Nazi salute, all I could think of was a Star Wars quote: “So this is how democracy dies; with thunderous applause”.
