Trump, and Washington pomp
No ritual embodies the stability of the American government more than an inauguration. And no one in modern times has arrived for the ceremony as a more purposeful destabilizer of governing norms than Donald John Trump, who becomes the 45th president of the United States on Friday.
The inaugural is this country’s ultimate civic rite, designed to assure the orderly transfer of enormous power, bolster patriotism and bind together a diverse people behind their new leader. The pageantry of the day, in so many ways fundamentally unchanged since the 18th century, almost cannot help but imbue each new holder of the office with similar auras of credibility and historic import.
This is why the rhetoric particular to each occasion gets so much attention, because the inaugural address is the premier ceremonial speech of every presidency — the words doing more than any other to set a marker for the unique aspirations and tone of the years ahead.
Curiosity about Trump’s text is enormous and transcends partisanship. That’s because so much uncertainty still envelops the details of his evolving ideology, and so many on both left and right still question his fealty to his own, sometimes contradictory, campaign promises.
Transition officials have offered little about what will happen once the podium bearing the presidential seal is Trump’s for the first time — beyond promising he’ll offer paeans to cultivating national unity during an address that’s relatively brief (not quite 20 minutes) and delivered from a text he’s been laboring over with the help of several speechwriters and close aides.
After winning the presidency with an outsider’s message as combustible and pugilistic as any since Andrew Jackson’s in 1828, Trump has not backed away at all from his headline-grabbing approach of responding to every perceived slight with a combative brickbat. He’s lambasted a series of cultural icons, from “Saturday Night Live” to Meryl Streep, media thought leaders from CNN to Vanity Fair, corporate behe- moths from Toyota to Lockheed Martin, and living Democratic Party legends from his vanquished rival Hillary Clinton to his about-to-be predecessor Barack Obama.
But if he can conjure even one sound bite for the speechmaking history books — something slightly more poetic, if only half as memorable, as his “Make America Great Again” campaign mantra — then he will have met a goal that most new presidents have missed. Jackson is one example.
Jackson’s speech was a longwinded mishmash of pompous and pretentious jargon, reading nothing like the national imagination of what the first frontier president might sound like. And so what gets remembered instead was the post-inaugural reception at the White House — where a rowdy crowd of thousands grew so unruly and inebriated that Jackson had to be evacuated to a nearby hotel.
In other words, his was one inaugural where the phrase “peaceful transfer of democratic power” did not really apply.
David Hawkings writes for CQ-Roll Call, Inc. (www.rollcall.com).