Today President-elect Donald Trump will deliver his second inaugural address. The second inaugural address is normally less dramatic than the first for a two-term president, but it is no less important in outlining a vision of what the next four years might look like.
Forty years ago, another prominent Republican who had won reelection delivered a landmark inaugural address. Ronald Reagan, a pillar of the modern conservative movement that took form in the 1970s, enjoyed a political victory lap one January morning in Washington. The ceremony allowed him to use his time in the spotlight to affirm a distinct rightward vision of society that would continue to define Republican politics through today. As with Trump, Reagan also was forced to hold the event indoors as a result of unusually cold weather.
Whether Trump can replicate Reagan’s success at entrenching a governing ideology that outlasts his own time in power remains to be seen. But the 1985 speech provides an important roadmap as to how transformative leaders have used these addresses as part of their means of achieving that goal.
On the day of Reagan’s second inauguration speech, Jan. 21, 1985, Washington, D.C. was freezing cold. The entire East Coast was experiencing a wave of bitterly frigid weather.
Despite the weather, Reagan was in great spirits. After riding into office in 1981 by defeating President Jimmy Carter with a campaign that called for a conservative national agenda, a majority of voters in 1984 appeared to have confirmed their approval of his leadership and agenda. Reagan devastated former Vice President Walter Mondale, a Minnesotan who staunchly defended the New Deal and Great Society agenda—even admitting in a televised debate that he would indeed raise taxes—with the kind of landslide victory that no longer happens in American politics. Reagan, once dismissed as a far-right extremist not fit for national office, won reelection with a whopping 525 Electoral College votes. Mondale only won the District of Columbia and his home state. Reagan also secured 59 percent of the popular vote.
The reelection was highly significant given that Reagan’s presidency had been contentious. Democrats, who never lost control of the House of Representatives, had spent four years railing against the administration for its attacks on the social safety net. They had successfully blocked his effort to reduce Social Security benefits and prevented him from dismantling any major domestic programs even as he cut taxes for the rich and deregulated industry. House Democrats had worked with grassroots activists to promote the nuclear freeze movement as an alternative to Reagan’s rapid acceleration of Cold War rhetoric and his curtailment of a nuclear arms agreement. They tried to block assistance to anti-Communist forces in Central America and backed NATO’s deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.
At the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo received enthusiastic support when he rejected Reagan’s claims that the entire nation was prospering under his leadership. “A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch,” Cuomo proclaimed, “where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.” Cuomo saw a Tale of Two Cities rather than a “shining city on a hill.”
But in early November, Reagan’s vision came out on top. Reagan worried that he would not receive the credit he deserved. As he complained following a contentious press conference, the “press is now trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide, or should I say a mandate?”
At the inauguration he intended to remind everyone of the meaning of his victory.
Reagan, who was about two weeks away from his 74th birthday, had combined drafts written by speechwriters Peggy Noonan, Ben Hart, and Tony Dolan. Noonan recounted in her memoirs feeling surprised that the text contained much less lofty rhetoric than his other speeches. Yet it was clear that Reagan, in a bipartisan mode, was determined to lay out his vision, with some specifics, while avoiding the most divisive issues of the time.
Because Jan. 20 fell on a Sunday, Chief Justice Warren Burger administered the oath in a private ceremony inside the White House. Shortly after Reagan conducted a virtual coin toss from the White House map room for Superbowl XIX—which pitted the Miami Dolphins against the San Francisco Giants—word came that the inauguration was going to be moved inside and the parade was canceled. With the icy winds that were blowing through the city, there would be a high risk for frostbite.
On Monday, Jan. 21, the ceremony was held in the U.S. Capitol rotunda that was surrounded by glistening snow covered streets. The hall was filled with about 1,000, including prominent members of Congress. This was the first indoor address since William Howard Taft did the same 76 years earlier. The next would take place in 2025.
The ceremony began at 11:30 a.m. Reagan looked his usual charismatic in a navy business suit, red-white-and blue tie, and white shirt. Reading his words without a teleprompter and in a more intimate, conversational style than people were used to, Reagan exuded confidence: “My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right and do it with all our might.” The speech unfolded into a full-throated defense of his conservative, anti-government philosophy. Presenting his vision as one that was grounded in American tradition, Reagan said, “We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give. We yielded authority to the national government that properly belonged to states or to local governments or to the people themselves. We allowed taxes and inflation to rob us of our earnings and savings and watched the great industrial machine that had made us the most productive people on Earth slow down and the number of unemployed increase.”
Reagan recounted how, in 1980, the nation had come to understand that, after decades of Democratic rule, it was time to restore “our strength toward the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly society.” The voters were right, he said. Following his first four years in office, he said that “tax rates have been reduced, inflation cut dramatically, and more people are employed than ever before in our history.”
Looking ahead, Reagan promised that the next few years would be a period when “Americans have restored their confidence and tradition of progress; when our values of faith, family, work, and neighborhood were restated for a modern age; when our economy was finally freed from government’s grip … when Americans courageously supported the struggle for liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world, and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom.” After telling a story about a bond that existed between two political rivals from the founding generation—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—he urged the nation to never “repeat the well-intentioned errors of our past. We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated federal establishment. You elected us in 1980 to end this prescription for disaster, and I don’t believe you reelected us in 1984 to reverse course.”
When turning to foreign policy, Reagan doubled down on the contradictory impulses of the modern right when it came to national defense. “Now let me turn to a task which is the primary responsibility of national government—the safety and security of our people,” he said, as he reviewed their effort to reinvigorate the nation’s military capacity to stand up the Soviet Union and to discuss his investment in a missile shield that he promised would “render nuclear weapons obsolete.”
At one point, Reagan recovered from a mistake that was in the prepared text. Someone had not fully updated his speech following the change in venue. After declaring that “we stand together again at the steps of this symbol of our democracy,” he quickly realized those words were meant to be spoken outside and nobody had revised it. Demonstrating his actor’s skill, he quickly ad-libbed, “Or we would have been standing at the steps if it hadn’t gotten so cold.”
While there were several detailed policies discussed in his talk such as a spending freeze, it was the philosophical argument that mattered most. Whereas his 1981 address, which argued that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” was about inspiration, this inaugural address was about legitimacy. The president was carving his ideas into the party stone even while making predictable and generic appeals to bipartisanship.
After the ceremony came to an end, the president and first lady joined in singing the national anthem before everyone listened as the sounds of a 21-gun salute could be heard from outdoors.
Republicans praised the speech. Sen. Joe Biden, who characterized the remarks as inspiring, dismissed the president’s calls for bipartisanship. That part, he said, was “really a sham. Ronald Reagan is our most partisan president.”
With many headline writers picking up on the sentence, “my fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness,” the press gave him good marks, not the highest. Some noted that he was more subdued than in the past, perhaps a result of the setting.
But most importantly, the message was delivered. According to Hedrick Smith in the New York Times, “The sense of urgency that he conveyed in 1981 was replaced by a sense of vindication at what he had achieved.”
In his second inaugural address, with two terms separated by Biden’s presidency, Trump will have his shot at delivering an address of legitimation, which for him is also about retribution.
To be sure, Trump’s situation is much different than Reagan. Trump did not win reelection—he suffered a defeat in 2020 before coming back four years later to retake power. He was involved in an effort to overturn a presidential election and defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in a polarized era when electoral landslides don’t happen, and the margins of victory are always narrow.
Nonetheless, within the confines of our contentious and unusual era, Trump— with reason—will claim that this year signaled relatively strong support within the electorate, including in areas that were solidly blue, for MAGA Republicanism. In theory, that set of principles would revolve around protectionism, deregulation and supply side economics, some sort of amalgamation of “America first” and neo-imperialism, cultural conservatism, and conservative populism. Whether Trump could stick to such a script is uncertain. He’s not Ronald Reagan and his approach to the media is more provocative reality star than Hollywood lead.
The opportunity is his, and it is the reason many Democrats are feeling defensive and concerned. The ceremony is of course just a single address, but it comes at a moment when the new Republican Party is potentially on the cusp of entrenching a new approach to governing.
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