Why Donald Trump's Inaugural Address Matters

Daniel McCarthy

Politics,

Throughout his time as a candidate and now in his first remarks as president, Trump has drawn a new map of politics.

No other inaugural address, it’s safe to say, has ever drawn Donald Trump’s contrast between “American carnage” and American greatness. His speech was nothing like the polished, soothing, and rather nebulous talk the public has been accustomed to hearing from victorious politicians. Trump was not celebrating; he was readying the country for war. Specifically, a class war—not along Marxist lines but instead nationalist ones, with citizens exhorted to buy American and hire American, to put “America first” in everything from commerce to foreign policy.

Trump also departed from the language of global hegemony that has marked inaugural addresses and presidential statements since the end of the Cold War. With echoes of an older U.S. strategic outlook—that of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams—Trump said, “We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.” And without explicitly alluding to a “shining city on a hill,” Trump restored the metaphor’s original meaning: “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example.”

Trump’s words don’t bear comparison with the eloquence of Washington or Jefferson, of course, but it was a very good speech, vastly superior to vapid pretentiousness of most recent presidential rhetoric. What Trump has done is to establish a new tier in the history of inaugural addresses. The classic phase that lasted from the Founders until Lincoln won’t be matched, and the grand rhetoric of Cold War presidents like Kennedy and Reagan, lofty yet credible, is likewise a thing of the past. After Reagan, inaugural addresses became parodies of what they had been in the decades when America was tested by world wars and superpower rivalry. The speechwriters were skilled, but their words rang false. Trump’s words rang true, at least as an expression—clear and forceful—of how the president and his voters see the state of country.

Even Trump’s critics should appreciate the clarity of his words and their import. Throughout his time as a candidate and now in his first remarks as president, Trump has drawn a new map of politics. That map needs be used to navigate only in the direction that Trump wishes to go. Certainly Bernie Sanders and other class warriors of the left could try to appropriate Trump’s appeal to national solidarity.