Next Monday, January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as president of the United States, the 47th in a row, eight years after his first inauguration, we will not have simply entered a new presidential term.

There’s more going on around Trump, there are a lot of big issues on the planet, writes New York Times Ezra Klein, one of the paper’s best-known columnists. “It’s the maturation of artificial intelligence technologies, climate change, and the collapse of the birth rate in the West,” he notes.

For Klein, all four phenomena together put humanity in a dark age, an age that, following Anthony Gramsci, the columnist calls “an age of monsters.”

But, as he notes, if we look at each of these “envelopes” separately from each other, we miss the big picture. The “forest” we’re missing is that the world as we’ve known it for the last 50 years, with the institutions down to the climate we’ve known, is collapsing, but at the same time, the technologies and movements of the next 50 years are emerging.

Trump takes office almost without political resistance and also Democrats exhausted and with very low morale. Even in 2016, Trump would not dare nominate people like Robert Kennedy J. for top departments such as health care or Pete Hegseth, for the Defense Department – who, the writer notes, is handling a colossal $850 billion budget.

“But in one sense, the president doesn’t need the party. Trump begins his second term with oligarchs on his side,” writes Klein, “from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, who has not hesitated to pour money not only into the campaign but also into the inaugural fund.”

He adds: “Even as they give money, other hugely influential businessmen are aligning themselves with the Trumpian philosophy. Mark Zuckerberg is one of them, who just last week cancelled DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) and fact-checking programs at his company, Meta. He was not the first company to abandon DEI programs, but perhaps the most influential.

With his trademark blunt honesty, Trump had written this after lunch with Jeff Bezos of Amazon: “Everyone wants to be my friend!”

It sounds ironic in this context that Klein’s implicit reminder of the quote adopted by the Washington Post (who is owned by Bezos), “Democracy dies in darkness,” the paper wrote in 2017.

“Democracy is not dying in the dark,” Klein writes but is “degraded by the dealings” between those who have power and those who want it.

So what will we see in Trump’s second four years? The possibilities are too numerous. However, compared to the first four years, the levees have been broken, Klein writes, so Trump will face less resistance.