It was a cold day yesterday in Washington, DC, when Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint as president of the United States of America. On account of freezing temperatures, the inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, and the weather became a primary focus of much pre-inauguration media commentary.

The Reuters news agency reported that this was “one of the coldest inauguration days the US has experienced in the past few decades”, while also providing other crucial ceremony updates such as that “Mike Tyson snacked on a banana in the overflow room”.

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I, myself, watched the event on my computer in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where it is precisely the opposite of cold and where I have spent the past several days battling the scorpion population that has taken up residence in my house. By the end of Trump’s swearing-in, however, I was undecided as to what was less pleasant: killing scorpions or watching the next episode of American dystopia unfold.

I tuned in at 11am, meaning I had a full hour before Trump took centre stage; for much of this time, the audience in the rotunda was treated to musical selections befitting a carousel or a circus. The frigid weather outside was, meanwhile, at least probably good practice for life on Mars, a territory Trump would soon claim for the United States during his inaugural speech: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.”

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This, to be sure, was not the only territorial conquest Trump promised yesterday. He also reiterated his determination to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as well as to seize control of the Panama Canal because “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form”.

But the Mars comments earned a maniacal grin from one person in the audience: the gazillionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for such ideas as that the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”. Musk was one of various representatives of the earthly super-elite who – unlike poor Mike Tyson – made the cut for a spot in the rotunda. Also present were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok.

As Al Jazeera noted the day prior to the inauguration, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly donated $1m to the ceremony, while “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have said they would donate $1m, along with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who donated $1m”. As of January 8, Trump’s inauguration fund had already racked up a record $170m.

Anyway, what better way to “Make America Great Again” than by supercharging the plutocracy?

Declaring at the start of his speech that “the golden age of America begins right now”, Trump went on to express numerous other hallucinations, including that “national unity is now returning to America”. Never mind that the tyranny of an astronomically wealthy minority is not exactly, um, unifying.

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Luckily on Planet Trump, reality is whatever he says it is. And Trump says that “sunlight is pouring over the entire world”.

In his speech, Trump announced a “series of historic executive orders” that according to him, will jumpstart the “complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense”. Among these executive orders is the declaration of “a national emergency at our southern border”, paving the way for the deportation of “millions and millions of criminal aliens” and entailing the deployment of the US military “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”.

Under Trump’s command, the US “will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations”. Then there’s the new “official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”. And of course, the more emergencies, the better: “[T]oday I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.”

Recoiling at the very thought of environmentalism, Trump proclaimed: “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

And if we happen to destroy Earth in the process, well, there’s always Mars.

As usual, the continuous invocation of God during the inauguration ceremony made a fine mockery of the ostensible separation of church and state in the US, and Trump revealed the reason he had survived a July assassination attempt in the state of Pennsylvania: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

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Last but not least, Trump took advantage of the overlap of his inauguration with Martin Luther King Jr Day, celebrated annually in the US on the third Monday of January, to pledge that “we will make his dream come true” – which would probably be easier if Trump himself weren’t a bona fide racist.

Indeed, Trump’s notion that “our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable” would seem to be distinctly at odds with King’s assessment of the US as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.

None of this is to imply that the Democrats have not done their part in terms of purveying global violence or upholding plutocracy, perpetuating brutal inequality, terrorising refuge seekers, and so on. But yesterday’s inaugural charade was an exercise in nihilism – and, as I return to my scorpions and Trump goes about making dystopia great again, I think I’ll take Mars over the “golden age of America” any day.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.