Waiting for President Donald Trump will not be like waiting for Godot, the famous absurdist drama by Samuel Beckett in which the expected person never arrives. The date has been set for Trump’s arrival – 20 January – and he has prepared for the occasion which will be funded by donations from the US’ leading billionaires, as is only fitting.

As Trump makes his grand re-entry into the White House, the audience is likely to think it knows everything about him. During his first four years in office, every aspect of Trump’s political and sexual life was made public. During the next four years, out of office, the US courts shed a glaring light on the darker corners.

But as would become abundantly clear on 4 November, none of this could deprive him of a sweeping electoral victory, after a campaign in which he said nothing serious apart from the insults he hurled at the incumbent president and his electoral rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris. Apart from that, his campaign was built on inflated pledges: to stop all wars, to cut big government, to raise import tariffs against friend and foe alike. Other statements took aim at the domestic and foreign policy architecture the US had built since World War II. Now, Trump plans to launch his next term in office with several unprecedented surprises.

He has vowed to reclaim the Panama Canal, purchase Greenland in the way earlier US presidents purchased Louisiana from the French and Alaska from the Russians, and to make Canada the 51st state of the union. One would have thought territorial expansion was the last thing on Americans’ minds, since they already have an entire continent.

Anyone who has observed presidential inaugural celebrations since John Kennedy at least will know that a new type of superrich will now be on board the presidential motorcade. This time they belong to the fourth scientific and technological revolution, the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, which has absorbed the information technology (IT) revolution.

Elon Musk’s star outshined others on the stages of Trump rallies. He had contributed more than $200 million to the Trump campaign. It added $12 billion to his wealth on the day the results were announced. Within the space of two months, his wealth doubled from $239 billion to $468 billion.

All the luminaries of the IT/AI revolutions who jetted over to Mar-a-Lago for dinner experienced similar boons. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos saw their wealth swell with Trump’s electoral success. The top five moguls are now collectively $542 billion richer. This departs from the commonly held impression that the Democrats’ electoral base is in the seaboard states, which are home to high-tech innovation. It also tells us that Trump not only turned the Republican Party upside down in terms of outlooks but also generated a new elite. This development will stump historians for some time to come.

The incoming Trump defies the rules that have been used for decades to forecast new presidents’ policies. Even conjectures based on his choices for his administrative team, from ministers to advisers, help little. The problem with predicting Trump 2.0 based on these people is that, regardless of their areas of expertise, they are united by their loyalty to him, a man whose words hover in a realm between fact and fiction. It is a realm that no conventional analytical instruments can reach. No amount of opinion polls, political-economic probes, or even so-called biopolitical analyses can fathom what policies Trump has in mind for his second term.

We might be waiting in the same way but Trump is much stronger than Godot. His strength derives from the ambiguity that so clearly surrounds his and his friend and confidant Musk’s social networking platforms, Truth Social and X.  Musk will be in a position not only to influence policy decisions and “streamline” government, but also to intervene in the decision-making processes within Congress, especially now that the Republicans control both houses.  

* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly