It may seem euphemistic to describe President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address as “uncompromising.” It will have struck many as merely crude and characteristically unpleasant.
Hard-hitting, it certainly was. Trump portrayed the past four years as marked by “horrible betrayal,” “vicious weaponization,” and a “corrupt establishment.”
But it is simplistic to think the moment at which he was speaking called for the sort of sunny rhetorical heights hit by John F. Kennedy telling the young nation, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
America is radically different now, more troubled. It is not united by a shared culture, and Trump would have sounded phony calling on everyone to put their shoulders to the wheel together. We are not even agreed about the direction in which we should be traveling. We are sundered by the fundamental question of what the nation is and should be.
Trump won reelection because voters decisively repudiated the deceptive governance they had to endure under former President Joe Biden. They did not want easy bromides from Trump. He is the champion of their anger and the embodiment of their repudiation, successful precisely because he promised to fight.
So, he could not have taken his oath of office and then gone to the podium and chanted kumbaya. After being returned to power to drain the swamp, you don’t gently chuck the swamp creatures under the chin. That, to coin an accusation, would have been a betrayal. To reflect the blunt message of Nov. 5, Trump had to be equally blunt. This comes naturally to him.
The public is sick of leftist magical thinking and Democratic rhetoric that pretends for ideological reasons and in defiance of generally understood truths that one can cure inflation by spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money, that one can save the planet’s climate by gifting energy production to polluting enemy nations, that boys can be girls, and that it is merely neighborly tolerance to open the borders to violent foreign criminals.
So, it would have been inappropriate and would have painted a distorted picture of modern America if Trump had delivered a breezy speech. He knew what he was doing and acknowledged to supporters shortly after the formal address that, against some advice, he decided to “go there.”
That does not mean his words were hopelessly dark. They were not as gloomy or negative as the “carnage” rhetoric of his first inaugural address eight years ago. Yes, the first half of the speech was partisan like his rallies during the election campaign. But instead of ending by asking for votes, he asked the nation to recognize that his aggressive “revolution of common sense” is a prerequisite of a new “golden era.” He was as hyperbolic as always, promising the “four greatest years in American history” and repeatedly asserting that each success would be bigger, better, faster, and greater “than ever before.” But despite this, there was much more to the address than empty braggadocio.
To those who doubted that “from this day on, America’s decline is over” and that his second presidency would bring “thrilling success and change,” he asserted boldly that “ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation” and “in America, the impossible is what we do best.”
Trump called on the nation to join him in the project of restoration. Although he did not win by a landslide, he was surely right on Monday when he said he detected a new mood of possibility. His public approval is as high as it has ever been, corporations that once worked actively against him are coming around, and even his most ardent critics cannot deprecate his mandate. He reflects the mood in America better than they do. There is a palpable national yearning to throw off the restrictions and pusillanimous leftism that have throttled it for decades.
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There was also more of JFK in the speech than will be acknowledged by those who regard the prince of Camelot as setting the standard for inaugural addresses. Kennedy’s actual policies — space exploration, tax cuts, and free enterprise — were decidedly Trumpy, of the kind to foster American strength, hope, success, and happiness. They were policies, like those of the new president, that valued expansion and daring over timidity and retreat. Trump declared that the United States would plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars, and it was not just his star-gazing adviser, Elon Musk, who applauded enthusiastically.
So, Trump’s second inaugural address, delivered by a pol more comfortable riffing off the cuff than in delivering scripted formal speeches, captured the balance of this American moment. On one side of the balance is anger, and on the other, there is hope.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
