A Tale of Two Inaugurations

Eight years ago, I was perhaps overly optimistic when I wrote in an editorial for my old newspaper, the Daily Inter Lake, that Donald Trump’s first inaugural address was a promise that “politics as usual would come to a grinding halt in Washington, D.C.”

Overly optimistic? Heck, I was dead wrong.

Instead we got more than two years of the worst kind of politics – the politics of personal destruction – as Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies planted the seeds of the Russia collusion hoax, leading to the failed Mueller probe, then another two years marked by a pair of partisan impeachments and divided government. In every regard, Trump became the lightning rod for false accusations and calumny.

He was branded as an illegitimate president by his political enemies and was forced to endure, to borrow Hamlet’s phrasing, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

When he took the lesson he learned from his opponents seriously – that they would stop at nothing to defeat him – and accused them of plotting to steal the 2020 election, he was vilified as the enemy of democracy rather than a defender of fair play.

And so he left office to face four years in political exile, where he was hounded by Joe Biden’s attorney general, an obsessed special prosecutor, a corrupt judicial system in New York state, and an ambitious and unscrupulous district attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. All told, they charged Trump with more than seven dozen felonies, and even convicted him on 34 charges in the ridiculous Stormy Daniels hush money case. The state of New York also tried to strip him of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of assets because he took out business loans and paid them back on a timely basis (no, really!).

But somehow after all that – even after two assassination attempts – Trump managed to retain a positive attitude about America and about the goodness of the American people. He used that message of restoring America to its founding principles as the cornerstone of his election campaign in 2024, and it worked.

Which brings us to Trump’s second inaugural address, which was even more optimistic about the future than the one he delivered in 2017. In some ways, the second inaugural address was a fulfillment of the promises made in the first.

“The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action,” Trump said eight years ago. But because of his own inexperience and the unending resistance to his agenda, Trump was not able to accomplish as much as he had hoped – or promised. It’s safe to assume that Trump shared that sense, which is why he pulled out all the stops last week and used the power of the presidency to reshape the government and much of the country before his vanquished opponents even knew what hit them.

When Trump declared, “The golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation. And we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer,” he might just as well have been talking about himself.

During the campaign, he had repeatedly said “success” would be his revenge or retribution. Now we know what he meant. Every new MAGA policy he announced was like a body blow to the establishment politicians who have underestimated Trump at every turn. When he said he would close the border, he meant it. When he said he would deport millions of illegals, he meant it. When he said he would pardon the “J6 hostages,” he meant it. When he said he would fire thousands of federal employees who could not be trusted to carry out his policies, he meant it.

Donald Trump wasn’t bragging when he told the nation, “I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do. In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

And if the last week is any indication, the best is yet to come.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.