U.S. President-elect Donald Trump gestures during a rally the day before he is scheduled to be inaugurated for a second term, in Washington DC, on Jan. 19.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
When newly installed president Donald Trump delivers his inaugural address Monday, he will be speaking to more than the American people. He will be speaking to history.
Over the decades and centuries, American presidential inaugural addresses have been tone poems of national purpose, broad statements of ethics, sweeping declarations of principles and inspirational pronouncements of hope. In language lofty and homespun, in addresses lengthy and brief, in front of enormous crowds or in the intimacy of the White House, they have been expressions of the country’s highest ideals and gazetteers to the country’s values.
That is an enormous burden for a speech that can range from the 133 words of George Washington’s 1793 address (he expressed a willingness to be “subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony” if he let the country down) to the 8,445 words of William Henry Harrison’s 1841 speech (he suffered a severe chill and died a month later of pneumonia). The average speech is 2,337 words – some 34 words shorter than Joe Biden’s speech four years ago.
Now Mr. Trump will add his voice, and his values, to the compendium of inaugural addresses, perhaps hoping to match the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln, who in his 1865 address, amid the Civil War, told the American people, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
Or to join Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who amid the Great Depression told Americans in 1933, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror …” Or to equal John F. Kennedy, who during one of the coldest periods of the Cold War bid Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
Those three are the gold standard of inaugural addresses: much imitated, never matched.
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It is likely that Mr. Trump and his aides will have examined earlier addresses to acquire a sense of their pacing, language and tone.
“Inaugural addresses aren’t delivered in the way ordinary people speak,” said Mary Kate Cary, a former George H.W. Bush speechwriter. “It’s not a conversational tone. There’s no humour, no stories, though there can be a lot of rhetorical devices. But a successful inaugural address requires rising above the current moment and the current circumstances, taking the long view and talking about the priorities facing the nation without issuing a laundry list.”
Most inaugural addresses do not list a series of legislative goals. That is for a State of the Union message. They speak, instead, of overarching values. They are high-minded.
A few weeks after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he summoned his speech writers and presented them with a challenge: to think about the meaning of his inauguration, to consider the historical moment and to put it in a broad context.
“The best inaugural addresses should be inspirational, unified, healing and forward-looking, even in difficult times,” Adam Frankel, who contributed to Mr. Obama’s first inaugural address and wrote Vice-President Kamala Harris’s concession speech, said in an interview. “In this address, the president is starting something. Presidents get only one of those opportunities a term.”
Even Mr. Trump’s closest advisers acknowledge that he is an informal, stream-of-consciousness speaker, prone to depart from prepared speeches. He is even more likely than Mr. Biden – known during his Senate years for mysterious, directionless rhetorical flights – to set off on unpredictable and sometimes inscrutable tangents.
But even presidents not otherwise known for eloquence have risen to the moment.
One example is Richard Nixon’s 1969 inaugural address. “No people has ever been so close to the achievement of a just and abundant society, or so possessed of the will to achieve it,” he said. “And because our strengths are so great, we can afford to appraise our weaknesses with candour and to approach them with hope.”
George H.W. Bush, whose rhetoric defied sentence diagramming, was articulate in 1989, when he described his hope that his term would be “the age of the offered hand” and said, “I do not mistrust the future; I do not fear what is ahead. For our problems are large, but our heart is larger. Our challenges are great, but our will is greater. And if our flaws are endless, God’s love is truly boundless.”
In his first inaugural address, Mr. Trump struck a dark tone. He spoke of “crime and gangs and drugs,” and vowed, “This American carnage stops right here, right now.” This prompted former president George W. Bush to turn to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Mr. Trump, and say something like, “That was weird.” In some tellings, Mr. Bush’s assessment included a crude word after “weird.”
But Mr. Trump also reached for rhetorical heights in his remarks: “So to all Americans in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again. Your voice, your hopes and your dreams will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.”
This time Mr. Trump will be speaking as a president who, because he cannot seek another term, immediately becomes a lame-duck leader, and one who faces not only the weight of governing a sprawling nation with ties and burdens across the globe but also the challenge of beginning to create his historical legacy. Matching that with his Make America Great Again rhetoric will be the principal task of his speech.