WASHINGTON — For 236 years, ever since George Washington, a newly elected president’s inaugural address has traditionally served several purposes.
One is simply to mark the beginning of a new administration in celebration and hope — and an occasional dose of eloquence.
Another, equally important, is to try to unify the country as far as possible after the rancor of a divisive election campaign.
It shouldn’t be a campaign speech; the time for campaigning is over. It isn’t a list of programs and policies; later speeches like the State of the Union are made for that.
“You want to aim at unifying the country — because if you don’t do that, you’re just the people who won and the people who lost,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, co-author of two books on presidential speechmaking.
“An inaugural address should focus on the things we have in common, not everything that divides us,” she said. “You want to see a president who is going to be for you even if you didn’t vote for him.”
That has been the basic model since Washington delivered the first, in New York in 1789.
Until Donald Trump, that is.
When Trump began his first term as president in 2017 he offered a few head-fakes toward unity. “We are one nation,” he allowed. But he spent more of his speech attacking politicians in both parties who had opposed him.
And he painted the United States as a crime-ridden hellscape of “rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones.”
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he promised.
One of his Republican predecessors, George W. Bush, offered a succinct evaluation afterward: “That was some weird s—,” he told Hillary Clinton, who sat next to him at the ceremony.
Trump’s divisive tone was deliberate.
“We didn’t win an election to bring the country together,” said his advisor Stephen K. Bannon, who helped write the speech. The goal was to “take on the elites … with a blowtorch.”
On Monday, Trump is scheduled to launch his second four-year term with another inaugural address. He promises that this time will be different.
“It’s going to be a message of unity,” he said last month. “No American carnage.”
That would be a pleasant surprise. After all, we’ve seen this movie before, and it turned out to be a bait-and-switch. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump aides forecast that the former president, who had narrowly escaped death in an assassination attempt days before, would present a new, more contemplative persona — a “softer version,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested.
That kinder, gentler Trump lasted about 20 minutes. At the beginning of his acceptance speech, New Trump urged both sides not to “demonize political disagreement.” A few minutes later, Old Trump reappeared and demonized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” for “destroying our country.”
To be fair, it was the middle of a hard-fought campaign — one in which Trump also called Democrats “vermin” and accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Now, however, Trump has finished his last presidential election. (Trump has quipped about seeking a third term, but his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said last week that the Constitution stands in his way.)
His main goal, presumably, is to make his second term a success — and Monday’s speech gives him an opportunity to start on the right foot by offering an outstretched hand to voters who didn’t support him.
The rationale for such an un-Trumplike move wouldn’t be sentimental. It’s a matter of practical politics.
Trump won the popular vote last year, but fell just short of a majority. His favorability rating in recent polls has reached a record high, but it’s still stuck below 50%. He claims that his election gave him a mandate, but it’s a tenuous one confined mostly to concerns over inflation and immigration.
Still, for the first time, he’s tantalizingly close to majority support. His inauguration gives him an opportunity to build a broader coalition — but only if he acts as a president of all Americans, not only his aggrieved base.
Republican strategist Karl Rove, who worked for the quotable George W. Bush, spelled out the practical case for magnanimity in the Wall Street Journal:
“Trump has an opportunity to solidify … reluctant supporters — and even convert some critics — if he delivers a strong Inaugural Address and sets an optimistic tone,” Rove wrote.
“Americans want Mr. Trump to talk about hope rather than carnage, about bringing the country together to overcome important challenges rather than dividing it over petty issues and threats of retribution,” he added.
Trump’s first term was a failure at passing legislation. He won a big tax cut — the easy part — but stumbled when he tried to repeal Obamacare, and never even presented the big infrastructure bill he promised in his first inaugural address.
If he changes his tone this time, Rove advised, “he’ll find he can get more from both parties in Congress with honey than with vinegar.”
Trump made his core policy goals abundantly clear during the campaign: new tax cuts, high tariffs and a mass deportation campaign.
Those needn’t be the focus of Monday’s speech. The inaugural address is a chance to lay out broad goals, a basic vision and the principles by which he hopes to govern.
The safe bet is still that the Trump who speaks in the Capitol will be the familiar, divisive Old Trump — the man history will remember for putting “American carnage” and “vermin” in our political lexicon.
But an inauguration is an opportunity to offer voters a measure of hope and the promise of a better future.
If Trump wants to swing for the fences, he could model himself after an earlier Republican president who took office in a bitterly divided nation: Abraham Lincoln, whose first inauguration was six weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War.
“We must not be enemies … ,” Lincoln said. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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