The Trump Inauguration was infuriating, exhilarating, and surreal.

What it lacked in 2016's intimacy and connection, it made up for in major executive order triumphs.

I just returned from the Trump inaugural. It was infuriating, exhilarating, and, in the end, surreal. Let’s start with the infuriating. Holding this inaugural indoors, with 250,000 passionate attendees left out in the cold, was outrageously dumb, counterproductive, and an insult to Trump's intensely loyal base. Young college kids from Saunders County, who drove from Nebraska to unleash all that pent-up Trump-loving energy, had to wait in IN THE SAME FREEZING COLD to get into the indoor rally that they would have experienced at the outdoor rally.

Trump fans are undaunted. You give them a 20,000-seat auditorium to watch instead of the giant expanse of the Washington Mall, and they will wait HOURS UPON HOURS early in the morning to see their man. This was a terrible miscalculation by Trump. And it did actual harm to the inaugural joy. I was so pissed I just watched it on TV in my Tyson’s Corner hotel room. My tickets were worthless.

Trump should have realized that if one crowd could handle temperatures in the teens, it was the MAGA faithful. They were bundled up and ready to lift off en masse. They were denied that opportunity. He also denied himself the chance to witness hundreds of thousands of his supporters in one place at one time for this historic victory. With what he endured—Democrat lawfare, two assassination attempts, and tremendous media bias––MAGA was primed to explode. The decision was tone-deaf, and it left many Trump fans bitter and angry, especially when the Capitol One Arena denied entrance to Trump supporters who stood in line for six hours while letting in others who just showed up before the festivities.

But, as Trump supporters clearly understand, such confounding errors of judgment and organization are part of being on the rollicking Trump Train. Look what you get in return. First, ending the racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic DEI mandates with their mandated enforcement of “correct” thought. Trump took the adage “take no small measures” to heart when he terminated DEI. Every employee serving in the vast DEI infrastructure has been summarily placed on administrative leave. That translates into the end—on the federal level at least—of the pernicious, evil thought policing that has been allowed to exist under the aegis of fighting “unconscious bias.” Moreover, the same Trump executive order terminated LBJ’s executive order 11246, which ends all affirmative action in all government programs.

Gone, too, is this sick and Stalinist idea of equity in which patently underqualified people go to the front of the line based on their orientation, skin color, or gender identity. Unfortunately, Trump cannot terminate the corrupt Academy Awards Woke criteria, which require a film production to select 30% of their crew, including actors, directors, and other high-level positions, from approved victim groups, or they won’t be nominated.

For every Trump overreach that no one asked for—renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, charging Denali back to Mount McKinley, and commuting the sentences of violent J6 members, which can be half-justified given Biden’s pardon of his entire family and the left’s failure to punish the far more violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter—there were dozens that there desperately called for. For example, Trump designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations. Nothing has been longer in coming, as America has endured hundreds of thousands of deaths by fentanyl and concomitant illegal border crossings these cartels engendered. Then there was the executive order entitled “Holding Former Government Officials Accountable For Election Interference And Improper Disclosure Of Sensitive Governmental Information,” which revoked the security clearances of the 51 intel operatives who signed the October 19, 2020 letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation despite clear evidence it was not. Their last-minute deep-state Hail Mary gave Biden the win last cycle and enabled the four years of hell we’ve since endured. These twisted operatives deserve far worse and should count themselves lucky.

In the end, from the Nebraska Society brunch—in which NOT ONE of the square, serviceable, and decidedly un-Trump senators and representatives remembered me though I worked with them for over five years—to the Liberty Ball, in which I got to see the President dance with his stunning wife while I hammed it up with cops and Fortlandia friends, it was enjoyable but not as wild and triumphant as it could and should have been had the inaugural been held outside.

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That didn’t mean the events lacked the customary Trump surreality. There was a vignette of tuxedo-clad Liberty Ball attendees dining late night at McDonald’s amidst the huddled homeless of DC.

There were the Village People, who personified how preposterously big the Trump tent had become, belting out, albeit poorly, their classic Gay Era hits of “YMCA” and “Macho Man.”

There were the entertaining gags, with fans taking their own mug shots alongside Trump’s Georgia mug shot

or similarly posing next to Trump as a McDonald’s server.

And there was Melania, always Melania, in her show-stopping Hamburglar hat. Maybe now, she has earned the right to be featured in Vogue. Hardly a fashion maven, the America-hating Michelle Obama has been featured multiple times.

While it felt at times a bit rote and remote as the Trump brand becomes corporatized and normalized, Trump remains a fun, funny, and larger-than-life icon of America. He is the ultimate outsider who’s finally been invited inside. All the big tech tycoons and heads of major global corporations in attendance were testaments to one overarching truth: America is now TrumpWorld, and you better get on board or get left behind.