Trump's 2020 speech

[gilliam]

From Mike Allen:

Stephen Miller, the speech’s principal writer, and Steve Bannon, whose worldview dominated and who helped with the prose , see a huge infrastructure bill as a way to attract voters, especially minorities, who opposed Trump in 2016. They argue privately they will shake up voting coalitions if they run new roads, repair tunnels and provide web access to other classes or regions of forgotten Americans. They also believe tariffs and bullying of corporate-outsourcers will change some minds, too.

The coastal bubbles hated the speech. But, like the campaign, it wasn’t aimed at them.

…

Bannon suggested: "I think it’d be good if people compare Xi’s speech … and President Trump’s speech in his inaugural. …

Why it matters: Trump advisers see confrontation with China over trade, territory and now the merits of globalism as a fight they WANT to define their presidency.

What’s next? We have a fair idea of how Trump’s nationalism will affect immigration and trade policy. But something that’s brewing under the surface — and seriously troubling business leaders — is the extent to which Trump will interfere in corporate America (think mergers, regulations) in what he believes is the service of the American worker. In other words: How Bernie will Donald get?

axios.com/trumps-2020-speech-2205248020.html

Speech was pretty short: 16 minutes. The only shorter inaugural speech was from Washington I think.

 

[gilliam]

From Robert Costa, Wash Post:

Trump, by contrast, used his speech to make a wide-ranging condemnation of America’s current state — talking about “American carnage” caused by urban crime, and saying that “wealth, strength and confidence has dissipated” because of jobs lost overseas.

Trump charged that both major political parties have lost their way, serving the needs of an elite rather than the needs of the public. In grandiose language, Trump sought to cast this day as a kind of restart for American politics, with everything before — Republican and Democrat — cast aside.

“The United States of America is your country,” he said.

With now former president Obama and three previous presidents watching from behind him, Trump seemed to condemn them as unfaithful to the popular will, saying that his inauguration signaled that “the people” would rule the country again.

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” Trump said. “Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”

washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-be-sworn-in-marking-a-transformative-shift-in-the-countrys-leadership/2017/01/20/954b9cac-de7d-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?postshare=4141484951376317&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.887f00f2959a

A video of the speech is here
realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/01/20/trump_inauguration_speech_the_carnage_stops_right_now_from_this_day_forward_it_will_only_be_america_first.html

 

[gilliam]

No one watching Friday’s Inauguration ceremony could miss the contrast between the gracious civility with which the incoming and outgoing presidents treated each other and the utter repudiation President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address made of Barack Obama’s eight-year reign. You could hear it at the start of the 16-minute speech. Trump thanked the Obamas for their “magnificent” aid throughout the transition. He then pivoted, with a loaded “however,” to how momentous this particular change of chief executives really is. It’s not just a change of administrations or parties, Trump averred. “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people . . . . What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people,” he said, echoing James Madison in Federalist 51.

You couldn’t have a starker contrast of visions than this. Goodbye to Obama’s power-swollen embodiment of the administrative state, hatched by Woodrow Wilson and dedicated to the proposition that the governors know better than the governed, whom they shepherd with public-spirited expertise for the people’s own good, whether the people like it or not. The people’s elected representatives, in this vision, matter little. They can serve, like Nancy Pelosi, as a rubber stamp for the ruler’s edicts, carried out by such executive-branch administrative bodies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Or they can get out of the way of the mighty pen and phone of the philosopher-king, whose demeanor constantly shows his exasperation at lesser beings with narrower minds.

No more, promised Trump. No longer will Washington politicians and the Washington establishment prosper, while factories close and ordinary citizens struggle.

Dire indeed was the picture that the new president painted of the country Obama leaves behind, with “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” and “crime and gangs and drugs” creating a kind of national “carnage.” These, Trump implied, are the fruits of the public-spirited expertise about which Obama is so supercilious. If you want an especially stark example of how incompetent government really is to advance the public welfare, just look at the public education system, “flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.”

city-journal.org/html/plain-and-powerful-inaugural-address-14978.html

Good analysis