WASHINGTON

Trump returns to power and governs by decree from the first hour

The second Trump presidency began with a blizzard of executive orders, mass pardons for the January 6 rioters, and withdrawals from the world. The restraints of the first term are gone, and the man has arrived knowing exactly what he wants to do.

Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president on January 20 and moved within hours to remake the American government by decree, signing a torrent of executive orders that reversed his predecessor's agenda, withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organisation, moved to end birthright citizenship, declared emergencies at the southern border and on energy, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." Most strikingly, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of some 1,500 people convicted in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including those who had assaulted police officers, an act of mass clemency that recast the insurrection, in the official telling, from a crime into a persecution. The contrast with 2017 was total: where the first Trump term began in improvisation and was quickly hemmed in by officials who saw themselves as guardrails, the second began with a plan, a purpose, and a determination to remove every restraint that had constrained him before.

The blitz was the strategy. By acting on a hundred fronts at once, immigration, energy, the civil service, trade, the culture, the new administration overwhelmed the capacity of the courts, the press and the opposition to respond to any single move, flooding the zone so completely that no scandal or challenge could hold the spotlight for more than a day. Lawsuits piled up against orders of doubtful legality; agencies reeled; allies abroad scrambled to understand a Washington that now treated them as marks. Whether the courts would ultimately check the more lawless moves, and whether the institutions would bend or break, were the questions of the coming years. But the opening fortnight established the shape of the thing: government by decree, at speed, on every front at once, by a man who had spent four years planning exactly this and now faced fewer obstacles than any president in memory.

THE MIDDLE EAST

The guns fall silent in Gaza, and the hostages begin to come home

After 15 months of war, a ceasefire took hold in Gaza on January 19, and the first hostages began to come home. Under a phased deal brokered in the last days of the Biden administration and the first of Trump's, Hamas began releasing the Israeli captives it had held since October 7, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and a pause in the fighting, as desperately needed aid finally flowed into a devastated territory. The scenes, freed hostages folding into their families after more than a year in the tunnels, Palestinians returning to the rubble of what had been their homes, were the first unambiguous relief in a conflict that had brought almost none. The deal was fragile, its later phases uncertain, the war's underlying questions entirely unresolved. But the killing stopped, the captives began to return, and for the first time since that terrible October morning, there was something other than grief.

IN BRIEF

A half-trillion-dollar bet; a reprieve for TikTok; Davos hears the new order

The new administration announced, on January 21, a private venture called Stargate, a plan by OpenAI, Oracle and Japan's SoftBank to invest up to $500 billion building artificial-intelligence data centres across the United States, one of the largest infrastructure commitments ever conceived, and a staggering wager on the AI future. TikTok, briefly forced dark by the divest-or-ban law, was granted a reprieve as Trump signed an order pausing its enforcement, the app he had once tried to ban now a bargaining chip. And the world's business and political elite gathered at Davos to take the measure of a new American order of tariffs, decrees and disruption, and to adjust, as elites do, to power.

The Column

Five hundred billion dollars, and the question hiding inside it

A private consortium announced a half-trillion-dollar bet on AI data centres this fortnight. It is a staggering number, and buried inside it is the question this paper has been asking for two years, now at civilisational scale: where does the power come from?

By Rebecca Cho

The Stargate announcement this fortnight, up to $500 billion to build artificial-intelligence data centres across America, is a number so large it is hard to hold in the mind, larger than the economies of most countries, one of the biggest private infrastructure commitments ever conceived. It was greeted mostly as a triumphant statement of American AI ambition, and as a market event, and both framings miss the thing that should actually command our attention, which is the physical question buried inside the financial one, the question this paper has been quietly asking since Nvidia's first trillion-dollar day and now must ask at the top of its voice: where, exactly, is the power going to come from?

Here is the arithmetic that the half-trillion headline obscures. Data centres are not abstractions; they are enormous physical buildings full of chips that consume staggering and growing amounts of electricity and produce staggering amounts of heat that must be cooled with staggering amounts of water and power. The AI build-out these facilities represent is, at bottom, an electricity story wearing a technology costume. Adding $500 billion of AI data centres means adding electricity demand on the scale of entire nations to a grid that is already strained, already struggling to decarbonise, already, as Los Angeles showed this month, failing to meet the demands the present places on infrastructure built for the past. The chips are the glamorous part and the money is the headline part, but the binding constraint, the thing that will actually determine whether this vision is buildable, is the wire, the substation, the power plant, and the announcement said almost nothing about any of them, because the power question is the unglamorous one that no triumphant press release wants to dwell on.

And this is where the story connects to everything else this paper tracks, because the power has to come from somewhere, and the somewheres are all fraught. It can come from new fossil generation, which the new administration will happily permit, at the cost of the climate commitments the same administration is abandoning, more gas, more coal, more carbon, to feed the machines. It can come from renewables, which are cheap but intermittent and slow to build at this scale. It can come from nuclear, which the tech companies are suddenly, tellingly, all rushing to buy, reopening old plants, funding new small reactors, because they have done the arithmetic and realised that their entire AI ambition runs headlong into a wall of physics that only enormous new power generation can breach. The $500 billion is not really a bet on AI models. It is a bet on being able to power them, and that bet is far from won, and its resolution will reshape the energy landscape of an entire country, and possibly the climate of the planet, in ways the cheerful announcement did not begin to reckon with.

So when you see the half-trillion-dollar number, do not think first of chatbots or chips or stock prices. Think of the grid. Think of the fact that the most ambitious technology project of the age is, underneath, the most ambitious energy project of the age, and that no one has actually solved the energy part, only assumed it. The money is real and the ambition is real, and the power to fulfil it does not yet exist and will have to be built, at vast cost, with vast consequences, and mostly, so far, without a plan. This paper has said for two years that the power question was the one hiding under the technology story. This fortnight it stopped hiding. Five hundred billion dollars of data centres is five hundred billion dollars of a question no one has answered: where does the power come from, and what does getting it cost us. Watch the grid. It is where the AI future will actually be decided, long after the announcements fade.

The Ledger

Stargate's $500 billion makes the AI build-out's scale, and its power problem, impossible to ignore. The money is a bet on being able to generate the electricity to run it, and that bet is unwon. The grid, not the model, is the real frontier.

Data centers & power

This is the fortnight the subject finally commands the front page in dollars. Half a trillion in data centres implies nation-scale new electricity demand, and the tech giants' sudden rush for nuclear power is the tell: they have seen the wall of physics ahead.

Rates

The new administration's tariff threats and the AI-spending surge complicate the inflation picture; the Fed holds, wary, its easing path clouded by a fiscal and trade agenda pointing the other way.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.96 percent (January 23), elevated as yields stay high on inflation and deficit fears. The LA rebuild, and the insurance crisis it deepens, will reshape Western housing markets for years.

India tech

Stargate and the AI-infrastructure race raise the stakes for India, which harbours its own ambitions to build data centres and chips at home; the power question this column raises is one India, with its own strained grid, will confront acutely as it tries to join the build-out.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. Stargate vindicates, at civilisational scale, this paper's two-year insistence that the power question, not the model, is the binding constraint on the AI future. It has finally reached the front page, in dollars too large to ignore.

The Back Page

They came home

After more than 470 days, some of the hostages came home this fortnight. The images were almost unbearable in their ordinariness: a young woman, taken from a music festival at 23, walking into her mother's arms; an elderly man, gaunt, blinking, held up by his sons; children who had spent a fifth of their short lives in the dark of the tunnels, meeting grandparents who had not been sure they would ever see them again. For 15 months their faces had been on posters, on the news, on the walls of cities around the world, a gallery of the missing that had become so familiar it risked becoming abstract, and this fortnight some of them stepped out of the posters and back into their lives, thinner, older, marked in ways that will take years to understand, but alive, and home. Not all of them; many will never come home, and the families still waiting watched the reunions with an agony of hope and grief entangled. And the relief is shadowed, as everything in this war is, by the devastation on the other side of the wire, the Palestinians returning this same fortnight to find their homes and their neighbourhoods and too many of their own people gone. There is no clean joy available in this conflict, only degrees of grief and the occasional, precious mercy. But a hostage coming home to her mother after 470 days in the dark is a mercy, unambiguous, human, and this fortnight there were some, and in a war that has offered so few, they are worth pausing on: the ones who came home, and the families, on every side, still waiting for the ones who have not.