By The Ghost of HST, Shadow Secretary of Reality Collapse
January 22, 2025
It isn’t a day for fireworks.
No shock and awe. No sudden screams from the abyss.
Just cold wind, tight-lipped smiles, and the slow grind of something wicked returning to its seat.
Two days ago, Donald Trump raised his right hand for the second time and swore an oath already soaked in gasoline. Now, Washington exhales — slow, shallow, and uncertain. The crowds are gone. The flashbulbs have dimmed. What’s left is silence, broken only by the sound of doors closing softly and staffers walking a little faster than they did last week.
Trump isn’t seen today. He doesn’t need to be. His proxies are already moving.
There’s talk of loyalty tests, shuffled org charts, a few too many closed-door meetings. Nothing confirmed. Everything implied.
A batch of executive orders is already on the books — one about “biological truth,” another about energy independence, and one cloaked in the language of “common sense.”
On paper, they read like standard-issue executive orders. But the language lingers — sharper than it needs to be. The kind of phrasing that leaves staffers glancing sideways and wondering what’s coming next.
In the inaugural address, he called it “Liberation Day.”
A “revolution of common sense.”
That’s not branding. That’s marching orders.
There are murmurs in the halls — about reshuffling departments, rewriting trade deals, tightening grips. The conversations get quieter the closer you get to them. Nobody’s saying much, but the tension says enough.
There’s no talk of healing. No unity playlists.
Just a government stretching its fingers, cracking its knuckles, getting ready to grip something tight.
This isn’t nostalgia.
This isn’t a comeback tour.
It’s a quiet return to power — practiced, controlled, and running colder than last time.
And it’s only January.
Filed from a borrowed desk in a borrowed room, one floor above the gift shop in a federal building where the thermostat is broken and no one makes eye contact anymore.
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