President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 7 news conference in Mar-a-Lago got me thinking about his upcoming inaugural speech, on Jan. 20. What should we watch for?
To begin, consider Trump’s first inaugural address, delivered on Jan. 20, 2017. This is the speech that’s sometimes characterized as the “American carnage” address, during which Trump promises that the American hellscape he describes elsewhere in the speech “stops right here and stops right now.”
Trump portrays an America in 2017 where “mothers and children are trapped in poverty,” with national landscapes marred by “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” and where “crime and gangs and drugs” have “stolen too many lives.”
This column isn’t about whether Trump was accurately portraying America in 2017. Maybe he was exaggerating for political purposes. I’ll just let former President George W. Bush, who was seated on the podium behind Trump, sum things up: “That was some weird s—-.”
Also on the podium were former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, along with their first ladies, including Hillary Clinton, whom Trump had just defeated for the presidency. Thus, he had an apt backdrop for the fifth paragraph in his speech: “Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power …”