Donald J. Trump and JD Vance were officially sworn in as the 47th president and vice president of the United States on Monday, January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Their inauguration looks different from previous years, in part because it is being held inside the Capitol Rotunda, instead of outside the US Capitol, as a polar vortex threatens much of the nation with below freezing temperatures.
Trump is expected to issue hundreds of executive orders as soon as he is inaugurated for his second presidency, including vows to impose tariffs on imported goods and to carry out a mass deportation effort. (How Trump plans to carry out these plans remains unclear.) He also pledged to provide “major pardons” for the roughly hundreds of nonviolent defendants convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think.
There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.
That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.
