“American carnage” was gone. No phrase in Donald Trump’s second Inaugural Address distilled his distemper quite like those chilling words from his first.
But the recriminations that gave rise to them? The portrayal of the United States as a dystopia in desperate need of immediate rescue? Those were as vivid on Monday, in the remarks that he delivered in the Capitol Rotunda, as they were in the speech he made after taking the oath of office eight years ago.
And they were joined by a newly pronounced messianic streak. America’s 47th president — who was also our 45th president — told us that he is not merely on a quest to bring this country into line with his and the MAGA movement’s vision for it. He is on a divinely directed mission.
Recalling the day in Butler, Pa., in July when “an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said that “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
That’s the keeper this time around — Trump’s trademark narcissism and usual grandiosity, along with an unsettling measure of theocracy, in one profoundly disturbing sentence. And it’s a signal of the sureness that he feels about all the executive orders that he then went on to promise, all the legislation that he foreshadowed and all the changes, from a militarized border to a war on wokeness, that he vowed.
While parts of Trump’s speech — the promise of national prosperity, a pledge of “national unity” — honored tradition and yielded to convention, there was a darkness in it that such scattered niceties couldn’t and didn’t veil. For much of it, he wasn’t sowing inspiration. He was serving notice and settling scores.
He riffled through a seemingly endless litany of complaints about the screw-ups of Democrats holding the reins of government before today. Cleanup efforts in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, attempts to contain the wildfires in Pacific Palisades, inflation, initiatives related to race and gender, regulations regarding fossil fuels — America under rulers other than him could apparently get nothing right. But he’d fix it all. And seize control of the Panama Canal along the way!
His strangely subdued manner contradicted a ludicrously colossal agenda and an even more colossal sense of self. It’s said that our most distinctive traits intensify as we age, and Trump is that maxim made president (again), his vindictiveness and vanity at their peak.
In one of his speech’s other most memorable lines, he claimed, “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” That’s a crazily reductive read of the American story. I wonder what God would say about it.
