Trump’s Fire Hose of BS, the Truth about Davos, and the mighty Cecile Richards

The rotunda was a billionaire base camp with the base locked out.

The 47th president of the United States may be Zeus, but he doesn't control the weather. For Trump, who lives and dies for Colosseum crowds, moving the inauguration inside to the 600-seat Capitol rotunda was a buzzkill that also illuminated an uncomfortable truth. The rotunda was a billionaire base camp with the base locked out. Those poor schlubs who’d bused in from Omaha in their red MAGA hats were shunted into the Capital One Arena to watch their deity on screens. When they shouted “Lock her up” at images of Hillary Clinton arriving at the Capitol, it was a throwback to the glory days when Trump’s rise was an improvised shambles shunned by the condescending elite who now so fervently embrace him. “Everyone wants to be my friend now,” Trump accurately said in December. And there they all were behind him on the dais, the leaders of the tech oligarchy and a bustier-flashing Lauren Sanchez who, as a friend of Jeff Bezos once explained to me, “regards her breasts as performance art.” Next to her, Mark Zuckerberg, now buffed and restyled from the pallid weenie of his early Facebook years (and fresh from advocating a return to “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s show), was caught on camera sneaking a peek. (As someone tweeted on X, “Good grief, Lauren Sanchez, put them away for one day!”

There’s been a subtle evolution in the Trump women this time around. I realize I am obsessed with noses, but has Ivanka’s gotten even smaller, connoting her new sunny I’m-not-interested-in-politics life? And if you think Melania will shrug off the White House and hang out at Trump Tower in Manhattan, you are dead wrong. Melania has reportedly been studying up on foreign affairs. Don’t be fooled by the absurdity of that Mask of Zorro hat. With Barron off at NYU, Ivanka avowedly out of the way in Miami, and the humiliation of the Stormy Daniels case consigned to the ash heap of history, Trump Season Two will see the First Lady's steely reinvention. At noon on inauguration day, in keeping with the rigid timetable of presidential change-overs, staffers were wheeling over racks of Melania’s wardrobe from Blair House to the White House, an epic vision of Manolo Blahniks on the march.

Even without the crowds locked out of the Capitol, Trump played his inauguration address as full-on chin-jutting Il Duce in 1936 declaring a new Italian empire from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome. Trump’s version was a garbage-filled goulash touting new American imperialism—snatching back the Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America (causing a hitherto grave Hillary Clinton to burst out laughing), and a Buzz Lightyear moment of American manifest destiny-ing off to Mars (cut to a thumbs up from Elon). A few feet from a dazed-looking Joe Biden, Trump depicted today’s booming stock markets, falling inflation, and lack of active military engagement abroad as a vision out of The Penguin’s purgatorial hellscape. As David Axelrod put it on CNN afterwards, “Trump’s speech was an American Carnage burger in a Golden Age bun.” There is no doubt Biden expected Trump to trash-talk his record, but Joe’s eyes widened with astonishment when even a member of the clergy at the podium kicked him in the balls. “There must have been moments in the last four years that looked dark,” the famed Christian evangelist leader Rev. Franklin Graham crowed. “But look what God has done!”

Except for the twaddle about the bountiful rewards of tariffs and the promise of liberated liquid gold right under our feet, there was nothing in Trump’s address that would make life much better for his blue-collar base and everything for the grifters and masters of the universe high on the scent of deregulation and vanished government vigilance. Trump probably understands this full well, which is why in the evening hours he threw MAGA originalists the red meat of pardoning all of the nearly 1,600 Jan 6ers. After all, he was wholly responsible for their languishing in jail in the first place, duped as they were by his own Big Lie of the rigged election to come to town and rampage through the Capitol.

As Democrats like Van Jones called Trump’s address “shock and awful,” there was worse to come in the new president’s 45-minute press conference from his Oval Office desk that he combined with an exhibitionist orgy of signing executive orders. (“Troops to the southern border?” Scrawl, scrawl with the Sharpie—“That’s a big one.”) I will hand it to Trump. After four years of a spectral president hiding from the media or quavering bromides off a teleprompter, the rude vigor of Trump’s charismatic presence parrying with reporters was refreshing, even if most of his answers were a fire hose of bullshit. Now we finally know what Trump was saying in those mysterious huddles with adversarial foreign leaders: it was all real estate deals all the time. Asked at the press conference about his famous rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump commented, “I think he has tremendous condo capabilities. He's got a lot of shoreline." As for Gaza, “phenomenal location… on the sea, the best weather.”

At the swearing-in ceremony at the rotunda, the fresh-faced U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club sang to a moist-eyed crowd, “Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.” For me, the poignant aspect of Trump’s comeback inauguration was the traducing of so many of America’s most beautiful traditions of democracy with the rank vulgarity and mendacity of those pretending to care about it. When a technical snafu with the backup music caused a long pregnant silence before Carrie Underwood performed her solo rendition of “America the Beautiful,” was it because the great 19th-century anthem of patriotism couldn't bear to hear itself sung?

WTF WEF

Davos is sure to have a strange vibe this week given its clash with the inauguration. (Trump will still show up via video to take a victory lap.) There is nothing more at odds with the zeitgeist than this annual high-net-worth circus of virtue signaling at the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded by the German economist Klaus Schwab—a tumescent toad reminiscent of Ernst Blofeld, the criminal mastermind in the James Bond pantheon—who has figured out a way to monetize social mountaineering to the point that, for seven days in this unpretentious Swiss resort, even a snowball has WEF branding on it. For ten years, I cohosted a Davos Women of Impact dinner with Credit Suisse —until this swank people’s bank imploded—in the high street pavilion CS created out of a storefront furniture shop. The dinners were my revenge for having attended innumerable smug “fireside chats” with Wall Street CEOs banging on about all the future women leaders they had in the “pipeline” (those same women, no doubt, who were shoved into dire Davos silos like a GE “Power and Purpose” snoozefest at the Hotel Seehof). One year, a young woman stuck her hand up and asked, “If your company has so many female leaders, why are you on the platform?” A beautiful moment straight out of a New Yorker cartoon.

The fun thing about Davos is that no one cares about the portentous official programming but the competition for top guests at the social sidebars is a lethal blood sport. Charlize Theron is doing a flyby at the Bank of America glühwein toast at the Hotel Belvédère? GET HER. Ursula von der Leyen is heading into a JP Morgan fondue fest at the Hotel Alte Post? Schnell! Schnell! I once glimpsed Mick Jagger sauntering out of the other end of Zurich airport with his entourage, left my bags at the luggage carousel, and sprinted to intercept him. It was our finest hour when he showed up at the Credit Suisse pavilion for cocktails at the same time as Justin Trudeau. Top that, Blofeld!

The chicest after-dinner mixer was usually hosted by Bono and London comms impresario Matthew Freud. Unfortunately, they were too cool to provide a coat rack or anywhere to leave your snow boots. At their 2020 event, I located mine only after a ten-minute rummage through a pile of fox fur vests and damp bobble hats. The next morning, perched on a stool on a panel at the pop-up “Equality Lounge,” I looked down and wondered why my feet looked so enormous. Holy moly! I was wearing gigantic scuffed bovver boots that didn't belong to me. Somewhere in Davos, a hulking Dutch hedge fund dude must have been navigating the ice with his feet stuffed into my size six Jimmy Choo moon boots. I sometimes wonder how he managed to totter home in the snow. Perhaps another small point scored for the missing female CEOs of Davos.

Warrior Queen

As I wrote these words, the devastating news reached me by way of a mutual friend that the great warrior for women, former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, had passed away on inauguration morning. After 18 months of battling brain cancer, it is darkly fitting that she did not have to see the gloating re-ascension of the leader who, in word and deed, tried relentlessly to lay waste to her lifelong, compassionate fight to allow women to make the most intimate and consequential decision of their lives: whether to give birth to a child.

I got to know Cecile, daughter of the raucous, iconic Texas governor Ann Richards, through the ten years of my Women in the World Summits at Lincoln Center. A tall, blonde Amazon who never arrived at cozy dinners without bringing a pie she had baked, she had a salty wit (“Pence is a pond creature,” I once heard her interject.) and a tireless gutsiness when all around her flagged. “The Democrats have to know it’s actually when they go low, go lower. You need to fight,” she said the last time I saw her at a September get-together at the home of two of her closest friends, Joel and Lisa Benenson. Despite her health agonies, she herself continued to fight, launching a digital series in 2023 to record the heart-wrenching stories of women who were denied abortions, in the face of dangers to their own health or that of their babies.

At Women in the World, she was our recurring firebrand who lit up the stage and aroused an emotional standing ovation before she even took her seat. Despite her terminal diagnosis, she was determined to speak at the Democratic convention last August about the assault on Roe v. Wade. Her account of a twelve-year-old rape survivor in Mississippi who was forced to carry a pregnancy to term and start the seventh grade with a newborn baby brought everyone in the convention hall to their feet.

In her final months of life, the understanding of Cecile’s great humane contribution won her a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. But it was the devastating death announcement from her family that brought home the shining, iridescent moral beauty of the woman we have lost. “Our words can't do justice to Cecile, to the good trouble she made, to the heartbreak we feel today, to the joy she brought to our lives,” her beloved husband Kirk and three children wrote to her friends. “So instead of our words, we’ll leave you with a question she posed a lot over the last year: It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking, ‘When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’”

Perhaps the answer lies in a tribute from one of her fellow feminist allies at the ACLU: “Today, as on many other days, I told myself, ‘Be more Cecile.’”