America First Begins

Jacob Heilbrunn

Politics,

Donald J. Trump takes the helm. What happens now? 

Consistent with his penchant for rebelling against the conventional rules, Donald Trump delivered more of a campaign speech than a traditional inaugural address. There were no paeans to American democracy or freedoms in his address. He didn’t quote any of the Founding Fathers or previous presidents. There was no attempt to reach out to his adversaries or bind the nation together. Instead, he came out swinging as he said, “This carnage stops right here and stops right now” and the “time for empty talk is over.”

Such language will thrill his supporters and horrify his detractors, which is what he wanted. Trump delivered, in pungent, even lacerating, tones, the message that he intends to stick to the themes that he enunciated during the race for the presidency. It wasn’t Trump as peacemaker but revolutionary. His themes weren’t conservative but populist. Positioning himself as a new Andrew Jackson, he poured scorn on elites and said it was time for the American people to “rule” Washington. He wants it always to be America, to borrow from the title of an essay that Patrick J. Buchanan wrote in the National Interest after the end of the cold war, first, second—and last. Nothing else matters.

Unlike Buchanan, who made an abortive run for the presidency in 1992, Trump succeeded in riding the populist tiger to the White House. Now he made it clear that he’s not dismounting. For both George W. Bush and Barack Obama his remarks probably came as a jolt even if they were familiar with the substance. He administered what amounted to a tongue-lashing to his predecessors. The only area in which Trump stuck to the rodomontade of past administrations was in claiming that he would “eradicate” radical Islam. This was as lofty a claim as Bush’s promise to “defeat the evildoers.” Of course it will never happen. This kind of apocalyptic rhetoric has less to today with foreign policy than Sunday school lectures.