Can Trump bring hope, and Biden wisdom?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Two big speeches are coming up, President-elect Trump’s Inaugural Address on Monday, Jan. 20, and President Biden’s farewell address, expected in the days just preceding.
To Mr. Trump: Turn the page on this historical moment and how people see you. Last time you gave an inaugural address, it was grim and dark.
“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation." American strength and confidence had “disappeared over the horizon." The “American carnage" must stop. It was stark, and it landed with such a jolt that a startled George W. Bush was widely reported to have turned to Hillary Clinton in the stands and shared his inner literary critic.
“That was some weird s—." It was. There was a sense conveyed that you were grabbing corrupt political elites by the lapels and naming facts they would never name, facts they had created and actively obscured. But it rattled rather than roused, in part because you were understood to be a reality-TV star who, in some bizarre, psychedelic twist of American fortune, had become president.
You are no longer understood that way. You are understood as a political phenomenon putting his mark on an age. And O God, life is hard enough.
People need hope. Five years of the pandemic, its aftermath and angers, of cultural furies, of inflation and endless politics—people feel beat, like they were through something bad and still aren’t sure what it was. Young men and women need to feel, as they enter American history, that they’re part of something rising, not falling.
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