Fred Bauer Trump Inaugural Blasts Biden, Lays Out Plan of Action In an address that sounded more like a State of the Union, the president excoriated his predecessors while promising concrete steps to secure his populist agenda.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-inauguration-speech
As he assumed the presidency again, Donald Trump proclaimed a “revolution of common sense” in his second Inaugural Address at the U.S. Capitol. Surrounded by the political elite and the captains of Silicon Valley, the new president pledged to restore faith in American institutions and championed a “manifest destiny into the stars,” with the United States expanding its territory and even planting a flag on Mars. The speech highlighted Trump’s many contrasts with his predecessors, even as it revealed how his political model has evolved.
Many recent presidents have used their Inaugurals to offer an ambitious vision for the nation or to rearticulate the terms of the national compact. Joe Biden’s, for instance, made a case for American “unity.” Some presidents have also sounded broad ideological themes, as in George W. Bush’s 2005 Inaugural Address, which committed the United States to the “expansion of freedom in all the world.”
But a series of disappointments and an embattled sense of national identity form the backdrop for the populist disruption of which Trump has been the avatar. His first Inaugural in 2017 lamented “American carnage,” and his second picked up that theme in assailing his predecessor’s record. Two signature moments of the end of the Biden administration—Biden’s bizarre attempt to “affirm” the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and his wave of preemptive pardons for his family and political allies—set up Trump’s denunciation of a “radical and corrupt establishment.”
Positioning himself against that establishment is essential to Trump’s outsider appeal, but his speech did not confine itself to complaint. Trump laid out a detailed set of policies that he would be implementing through executive orders. He led with illegal immigration—a central issue of his 2024 campaign—but also talked about efforts to promote energy development, increase efficiency in government (a nod to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency), reform trade, and block the Left’s identity-politics agenda. Compared with the broad-brush thematics of most recent Inaugurals, the laundry list of policies sounded more like a State of the Union speech.
Distrustful of ideology, Trump offered instead a concrete plan of action. While his first Inaugural gestured vaguely toward an optimistic future, his second developed that theme at greater length. Trump presented America as a nation of energy and vitality: subduing the frontier (this one in space), splitting the atom, and prevailing in global conflicts. Celebrating success and promising to lead others to it are long-standing elements of Trump’s personal brand. The how-to-win advice of The Art of the Deal blends seamlessly into his promise at the close of his second Inaugural: “We will stand bravely, we will live proudly, we will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans.”
Those aspirational notes are well-suited to the high-tech disruptors who have become key political stakeholders in Trump’s coalition. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other leading tech figures sat behind the 47th president as he spoke. This, too, indicates a change in political dynamics. While digital tycoons were mostly unified in opposition to Trump and populism in 2017, the frustrations of the Biden years and the excesses of the progressive cultural war have caused many tech figures to see in Trumpian populism a chance to reset the political conversation and slash red tape.
Beyond the fact that Trump was following in Grover Cleveland’s footsteps as a president serving two non-consecutive terms, this was a speech from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A president whom Trump mentioned, William McKinley, opened his second Inaugural by talking about the budget and later in the speech celebrated the expansion of the United States. American presidents back then were still trying to reknit the national fabric after the Civil War while grappling with a fast-changing geopolitical situation. In the 2020s, the United States faces some related challenges. A sense of a withered national compact has inflamed political conflict, and the international dynamic has transformed. The rise of China and the stagnating birthrates of many American allies has shifted the balance of power abroad.
Populism (another term that gained currency in the nineteenth century) has arisen in part because of these structural changes. The unraveling of American foreign policy under Biden, the border crisis, and the ravages of inflation have given Trump and the Republican Party a chance to govern again. Fusing the promise of growth and the demands of solidarity will take some political and policy ingenuity. Republicans seemed on the verge of a generational majority in 2005, too, but dissatisfaction with the second George W. Bush administration sent the GOP into a political winter. This new, tentative realignment will be secured only if the party does better this time.
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