An editor's opinion on the Inaugural Address

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The author, Robert Schlesinger is managing editor for opinion of US News
With any luck President Donald Trump's inaugural address will accurately portend his term in office: short, bleak, delusional, bombastic, divisive but not in the end especially memorable.

Trump's first message to the nation was a pastiche of delusion, deception, grievance and huckster nationalism. Trump reached for the eloquence of a Ronald Reagan or John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt but ultimately achieved the kind of staccato incoherence that one would actually expect from the first Twitter president.

There's something genuinely dizzying about watching someone who came in second place by nearly 3 million votes stand up and declare that "Jan. 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again." It was a clumsy, faux-populist paean to democracy utterly discordant with the fact that it was being uttered by someone whose very presence in office is an affront to the most basic of democratic notions – that the will of the people prevail.

But divorce from reality is not surprising coming from the new president; his campaign was a never-ending series of untruths and outright lies and his transition was no different. So when in his inaugural address he returned to familiar themes of an American wasteland riven by crime and economic despair, talking about the "crime and the gangs" and a hollowed out economy – what he described as "American carnage" – he was recycling long-disproven nonsense.

The future scholars with the unhappy task of studying the inaugural address of the 45th president might be excused if they wonder what country he's talking about. The murder rate is still lower than any time between the mid-1960s and 2014 and is only marginally up from its nadir; the unemployment rate is at 4.7 percent, pretty much as low as it's been in a decade; the only "carnage" evident on Friday afternoon was the new president's assault on truth and reality.

Of course his talk of seizing power from the establishment is belied by his transition, his and his party's assault on ethics standards and his cabinet of billionaires. Trump talks to Main Street while empowering Wall Street.

And that's not to mention what passes for rhetoric when Donald Trump takes to the microphone. "Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come," he said. "We will face challenges, we will confront hardships, but we will get the job done." Or: "We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power." These sound like someone who listened to Kennedy's inaugural ("Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…") a lot but still can't figure out why it was so good. (Though his complaints about spending too much time, energy and money helping our allies is a near-mirror opposite of JFK's promise that as leader of the free world America would "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.") Ditto Reagan with this clunker: "We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people." His reference to "forgotten men" is a direct pull from Roosevelt, though one wonders if Trump even knows it.

"America First" has its own odious history. Its originators wanted to ameliorate Hitler; Trump is an unabashed admirer of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin – the fact that he is no Hitler is cold comfort as he is monster enough. Trump's speech, as with his campaign, was infused with an angry, us-against-the-world mentality that flies in the face of the world order the United States has spent 70 years building – to our great benefit. In a shrinking and increasingly globalized world, he promises safety and protection in a fortress America which is neither actually desirable nor achievable. Not for nothing does Putin support Trump and the sort of abdication of world leadership his language portends. Russia will gladly fill the vacuum created by a withdrawn America; so will China.

Indeed the rest of the world – excepting Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping – must have watched with dismay at being dismissed as a bunch of takers and parasites. Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf was right when he tweeted that the speech was "one of the most negative inaugural addresses to the rest of the world in modern history."

Points I suppose to Trump for at least nodding in the direction of national unity and decrying prejudice. "Whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots," he said (raising the grim question of what color blood he thinks nonpatriots have coursing through their veins). But again his transition – in which he did nothing to reach out to the 56 percent of voters who supported another candidate – belies his words. And again it was in the context of a scary nationalism as rallied against the rest of the world.

And of course the speech was rife with Trump's standard promises of a return to American greatness. My seven-year-old son, watching with me, at one point asked quizzically, "Is he saying that no other president was good?" Indeed, Obama was ridiculed eight years ago for promising to stem the tide of global warming; Trump spoke of "free[ing] the Earth from the miseries of disease"! Who needs Obamacare when disease itself will be crushed by the Trumpian boot?

This points up the great problem with which all presidents must come to terms – the transition from campaigning to governing. This was made especially stark in an address so laden with campaign themes. People have long wondered when and whether Trump would adopt a presidential mien in his tone and behavior. Whether he does that or not, starting now he increasingly owns the state of the nation. As Josh Barro writes at Business Insider: "As a candidate, your job can be to point out how terrible everything is; as president, you're supposed to make things better. How much has to change before he can declare that America is great again, and will his voters ... agree that things have changed enough?"

And do voters want the change Trump promises to bring? If the nation were indeed as ravaged as he paints it, you would think its citizens would be glad to be rid of the old president and excited about the new. And yet now former-President Barack Obama left office with a 57 percent approval rating while his successor enters 15 percentage points lower, at a hair above 42 percent – easily the lowest in the history of polling.

Trump has already declared his re-election slogan to be "Keep America Great!" But if he is unable to deliver on his basic premise of restoring greatness, he might be on the wrong side of his signature 2016 promise in four years. "We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action – constantly complaining but never doing anything about it," he declared. The ball is now in his court. Buckle up – it's going to be a bumpy ride.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-je ... picks=true
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: An editor's opinion on the Inaugural Address

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nigel wrote:Ah, sore loser. What does Fox News say?
Yes, that's more like it. A new Reagan.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/01/20/l ... ablishment
New Reagan, with lies, union busting, tax breaks for the rich, Iran Contra like scandals, screwing up Social Security, Medicare, anti immigration, bragging about doing things he never did, and trying to destroy the safety net for the poor.

Yep that sounds like Reagan
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: An editor's opinion on the Inaugural Address

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TrueTexan wrote:
nigel wrote:Ah, sore loser. What does Fox News say?
Yes, that's more like it. A new Reagan.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/01/20/l ... ablishment
New Reagan, with lies, union busting, tax breaks for the rich, Iran Contra like scandals, screwing up Social Security, Medicare, anti immigration, bragging about doing things he never did, and trying to destroy the safety net for the poor.

Yep that sounds like Reagan
Raised taxes 11 times and if I recall, about 180 out of his administration were investigated and many charged.

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This is just my opinion, yours may vary and is no less valid.
- Me -

"I will never claim to be an expert, and it has been my experience that self proclaimed experts are usually self proclaimed."
-Me-

I must proof read more

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