The Wrong Speech for a Divided Country
In 1923, Ernest Hemingway, a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, was ushered with other reporters into a press conference with Benito Mussolini. The recently installed Italian prime minister sat at his desk reading a book, his face “contorted into the famous frown.” He knew what the reporters would write, Hemingway said in his dispatch: “As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.”
Hemingway continued, “I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary – held upside down.”
The inauguration of Donald Trump this week as our 47th president brought Hemingway’s story to mind.
The inauguration was an exercise in raw meat propaganda for the Trump faithful. The president’s speech, the centerpiece, was a recitation for the “glorious” accomplishments that will come with his administration and self-praise for his political comeback. He survived an assassination attempt during the campaign, he said, for a profound reason: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
As a piece of writing, the speech was unusual for an inauguration in its specificity and its bombast. Trump lived up to some of his promises the same day by signing a spate of executive orders as well as giving controversial pardons to people convicted for participating in the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol.
While this may confirm to those who voted for him that “the four greatest years in American history” lie ahead, a careful reading of his remarks suggests that he is setting himself up for significant failures. After weeding out such empty statements as “sunlight is pouring over the entire world” as a result of his election, we are left with a large number of equally meaningless goals as well as unrealistic and contradictory promises.
What value is there, for instance, in establishing an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs? We have been collecting tariffs for hundreds of years without it.
Also perplexing is Trump’s pledge to use common sense in the administration of government. This is code for not relying on elites. But the people arrayed behind Trump while he delivered his speech were as elite as it gets in our country. Many of them flew to Washington in private planes, and few are seen socializing with the average Americans Trump claims to care about most.
More contradictory is that many of these elites will be on his A-team and have little expertise in tasks to which they are assigned. Hedge fund investor Scott Bessent (a protégé of George Soros, whom conservatives love to hate) is a credible choice as Treasury Secretary. But Elon Musk, who is supposed to make the government more efficient, has so little understanding of the task that he has claimed he will eliminate $2 trillion from the $7 trillion federal budget. This is impossible unless he plans to close down national parks and carve into Social Security, among many other beloved government endeavors. Perhaps Musk possesses common sense, but common sense is not much good if one does not have relevant experience and is ignorant of basic facts.
Let’s not forget that Trump mentioned in his speech that Musk’s project will be housed in “the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency.” Does it show common sense to create a new bureaucracy to make the government leaner, while at the same time adding a redundant bureaucracy for collecting tariffs?
On the campaign trail Trump went out of his way to antagonize America’s strongest allies. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America would be insulting a nation he needs in order to solve the border crisis. Quipping that Canada should be our 51st state was little more than trolling, but levying a 25% tariff on our northern neighbor would hurt Canadian businesses and American consumers. His stated desire to acquire Greenland, a dominion of Denmark, needlessly punctures the pride of a NATO ally. Saying we need to “take back” the Panama Canal ignores the verities of a hard-won international treaty.
These objectives run headlong into Trump’s aspiration in his inaugural speech that “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be, a peacemaker and unifier.”
Other promises are nonsense. Trump says that under him, “We will be a rich nation again.” By most measures, we are the richest nation in the world now. With his leadership, he also said, “Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.” How?
Trump does not reconcile his economic policies with his promise to “rapidly bring down costs and prices” to defeat inflation. As the Wall Street Journal reported the day after his speech, “Economists are starting to model the effects of President Trump’s plans to raise tariffs, cut taxes and restrict immigration. The upshot: Inflation and interest rates are likely to be higher for at least the next two years than forecasters anticipated before the election.”
Apparently to bolster his case for restoring President McKinley’s name to the Alaskan peak now known as Denali, he said the tariff-loving McKinley gave Theodore Roosevelt the money to build the Panama Canal. This never happened. The canal was a thorough-going Teddy Roosevelt project that occurred after McKinley’s assassination.
Some of Trump’s promises sound like lines in an opéra bouffe. What will it mean to rename the Gulf of Mexico? We can imagine a naming war in which heads of state around the world give their own names to places on the globe so that no one will know what the other is talking about when they meet at the United Nations.
But the biggest give-away to the flaws in Trump’s approach to governing lies in the speech’s hubris. “My recent election,” Trump proclaimed, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal.” “The entire nation,” he added, “is rapidly unifying behind our agenda.”
One of the great miscalculations of Joe Biden’s presidency was that he attempted major changes even though his election mandate was small. He should have focused on a few things that really mattered, such as immigration.
The same mandate limitation applies to Trump. If he wants to attribute his victory to God, we should note that the Almighty was ambivalent. When the final ballots for all the candidates were tallied, Trump received less than 50% of the popular vote. In 2020, Biden had more than 51% and more popular votes overall than Trump did in this last election.
Trump’s party controls both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Supreme Court tilts in his direction. But this is far from a solid phalanx. Ask House speaker Mike Johnson, who wakes up each morning wondering if he can muster enough votes from his party to pass legislation, let alone remain in his job. Meanwhile MAGA-world polarizer Steve Bannon is criticizing the tycoons who were standing behind the incoming president at his inauguration.
Donald Trump is a master of posturing. It can be a strength. Leadership calls for imagining something better. But it is a weakness when the leader sells empty images. Trump’s windy posturing and self-glorification will not unite our divided nation. Institutions and laws exist to limit what he can do.
Trump can bring notable achievements, or he can plunge us in much wasted effort that only makes the divides greater.