Eight years ago, with his “American carnage” speech, Donald Trump delivered what was likely the darkest inaugural address in U.S. history. During his second inaugural, he tried for a slightly more uplifting message.
“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success,” Trump said. And although he listed many challenges, he assured the nation that they would be “annihilated” by American momentum. (Yes, the word choice was strange.) “The golden age of America,” he declared, “begins right now,”
Perhaps it would be more aptly called a Gilded Age. Trump was joined in the Capitol Rotunda by many of the nation’s richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. The attendance of the business titans was rendered conspicuous by the small space. (Other major donors to the inauguration were forced to watch on a livestream when the ceremony was moved inside because of frigid temperatures. Don’t shed a tear for them; they made the donations to curry favor and influence, not for the view.) Their presence also added a strange dimension to Trump’s complaint that “for many years a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens.”
This was the first time since Grover Cleveland’s second inauguration in 1885—during America’s first Gilded Age—that a president was sworn in for a non-consecutive second term. And many of the policies and ideas in the speech evoked the late 1800s more than any recent presidency.
The speech was saturated with 19th-century imperialism. Trump announced that he would order the name of America’s highest peak to be changed from Denali back to its old name, Mount McKinley, and he extolled the 25th president’s use of tariffs. (Left unmentioned was the fact that William McKinley was beloved, and bankrolled, by the plutocrats of his era, and twice defeated the populist William Jennings Bryan.) Trump also said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” and he promised to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars,” invoking the controversial slogan of expansionism. Picking up an idea he had voiced in recent weeks, he also vowed to seize the Panama Canal from Panama.
And why wouldn’t Trump be feeling triumphant? The ceremony was held inside the Rotunda, where a little more than four years ago, supporters whom he’d instigated to storm the building paraded through with a Confederate flag. This time around, Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Inaugural Ceremony Committee, heralded America’s “peaceful transfer of power” in the same building where it was disrupted on January 6, 2021. A few minutes later, Trump stood face to face with Chief Justice John Roberts, who granted him broad immunity in a ruling last summer, and took the same oath of Office that he flagrantly broke at the end of his first term. His mood was not only celebratory but messianic.
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said, describing the failed assassination attempt against him last summer. “Over the last eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any other president in our 250-year history.” (Perhaps he forgot that McKinley was more than just grazed by an assassin’s bullet.)
In particular, he railed against “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department”—a reference to the federal felony charges brought against him for attempting to subvert the 2020 election and for refusing to hand over classified documents he removed from the White House. “Never again will the power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” he said, a vow that sits uneasily with promises of retribution from himself and from his nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel.
Historically, presidents have used their inaugural addresses to pivot from the blue-sky promises of the campaign trail into the more sober language of governing. Rather than dwell on campaign vows they may struggle to keep, they reach for gauzy and unifying language. This, however, is not Trump’s forte. In major speeches, when Trump strains for the tone of an inspirational statesman he usually ends up sounding more like a motivational speaker. (“In America, the impossible is what we do best,” he intoned today.) This afternoon’s often repetitive speech is unlikely to live on as a work of oratory. Nor did Trump make much effort to reach out to or reconcile with the voters who don’t support him, although he promised that “national unity is returning to America.” He boasted about his (very narrow) margin in the popular vote and victories in seven swing states. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom,” he said.
Instead, Trump delivered something akin to his stump speech, a meandering laundry list of policy promises of varying degrees of plausibility. He called for a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. “We will drill, baby, drill,” he said. He promised to impose major tariffs. He said he would deploy U.S. troops to the Mexican border, expand immigration enforcement inside the country, and declare drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations. He also signaled an executive order that will continue the attacks on people who don’t conform to traditional gender norms. “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.
But much of the speech was devoted to things that are almost certainly never going to happen. He vowed to beat inflation but didn’t say how. He said he’d establish an External Revenue Service to handle the money he claimed tariffs would bring in, but this would require an act of Congress, as would the Department of Government Efficiency he claims he’ll create. (One wonders what the efficiency hawks at DOGE would have to say about the proposed ERS, given that it would represent a superfluous bureaucracy created to perform a function already handled by Customs and Border Patrol.) This was all a warm-up for Trump’s most audacious promise. “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable,” he said.
It was an appealing promise. But the world already knows what four years of a Trump presidency looks like. Serenity, peace, and predictability were not the hallmarks of his first term, and they are unlikely to describe the second any better.
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