Donald Trump’s January 2017 inauguration speech stands out as one of the most memorable — and polarizing — addresses in modern American history. With a starkly dystopian tone, the 45th president painted a grim portrait of a nation in decay, infamously declaring: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Trump’s words back then painted a picture of a nation in crisis, one beset by poverty, crime, and the decay of its once-proud industrial base. He spoke of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” and an education system “flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.” His words conjured up visions of doe-eyed women and children trapped in a wasteland, crying out for a savior. It was a wartime speech made in peacetime, where the enemy is nebulous but the supposed destruction is immense.
This vision of a crumbling America resonated deeply with Trump’s most embittered supporters, but it also drew criticism for its exaggerated portrayal of the nation’s plight (The LA Times called it “raw, angry and aggrieved,” with “little to heal the nation’s wounds”; The Guardian called it “sinister”.) His depiction of American life as a battleground — one marked by the ravages of crime, drug addiction, and job loss — was a calculated political gambit, underscoring his message of radical change. It was also an exercise in finger-pointing at the supposed culprits: foreigners.
“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared,” he said. Working-class voters who had been left behind by the economic shifts of globalization felt that they were finally being recognized after years of being told to celebrate the technological advances that shut down factories and took away their jobs. Conservative politicos imagined NATO and other international treaties that they believed had effectively cuckolded the United States on the world stage. The older generation, who remembered the near past in which America effectively ruled the world, nodded along as the 45th president added: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”
Importantly, this wasn’t just selling a message of anger at a declining America. It was selling the politics of envy: Someone else is now living our dream. And it was at its heart a hyper-capitalist message, implying as it did that America should’ve stayed on top and everyone else should’ve stayed at the bottom. Other politicians in other countries could have recast wealth redistribution across the world as a positive thing; an aspiration, even. For Trump, it was the root of all America’s problems — and only by reversing it, and ensuring someone else went to the bottom of the pile, would things be better again for all true and loyal Americans.
At this point, Trump was still heavily selling his “drain the swamp”, anti-establishment message. It was the elites versus the patriots — indeed, he said, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” Whether you were born on the windswept plains of Nebraska or in urban Detroit, he added, you “look up at the same night sky” and are infused with the “breath of the same Creator.” But there was a whisper of something else in there: “We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own.” To which one might ask: defend from whom, exactly?
There’s reason to believe his words will be very different this time around — even if his subsequent actions aren’t.
There are clues about this in the recently released official inauguration schedule. First of all, the theme of the 60th presidential inauguration — agreed upon by the bipartisan but still Trump-supporting, Republican-leaning inauguration committee — is “Our Enduring Democracy: A Constitutional Promise.” That in itself is miles away from Trump’s 2024 rally speeches about changing the Constitution by “modifying” the 25th Amendment and about pardoning the January 6th rioters. Indeed, soon-to-be vice president JD Vance stated on Fox News that he does not believe those protesters who were violent on January 6th should be pardoned. CPAC may have featured a mock jail cell with a crying January 6th protester inside, awaiting his release under a second Trump term, but it seems not everyone will be immediately embraced under a Trump-Vance ticket.
It’s also been reported that demand for protest tickets in Washington DC for Inauguration Day has been lower than expected. Without the backdrop of large protests, the now-47th president will be less likely to position himself as a pariah. Perhaps he will spin this as evidence that America is more behind him this time, and speak about the supposed divide between Democratic politicians and the American people. That’s a theme he also warmed to in 2017 (“Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed.”)
In the years since 2017, the US has weathered multiple crises: a global pandemic, economic tumult, and a shifting geopolitical order. The national mood is perhaps less uniform than it was in 2017, with some of the grievances Trump once voiced having found new expression in the voices of his political opponents. And Trump’s rhetoric has always been malleable, shaped by both his audience and the political context of the moment.
“We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth,” Trump said in 2017. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”
Though Isis seemed to be a diminishing threat since then, the recent Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans has brought radical Islamist terrorism back into the conversation. It’s more likely, however, that in 2025, Trump will talk less about Islamists and more about antisemitism, Israel and its war in the Middle East. Strategic allies are likely to feature more heavily in a 2025 speech, where 2017’s geopolitics allowed him to be more inward-looking. That “total allegiance to the United States of America” is unlikely to be revisited, considering his recent musings about buying Greenland and making Canada the 51st state.
Meanwhile, the “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border that was promised during the first incarnation of Make America Great Again is no longer a good enough solution for the far right. Once, stopping a supposed tide of migrants and protecting what was inside America was the order of the day. Now, “the enemies from within” are a continuing theme. There has been increased talk about rooting out the supposed sicknesses from the ailing body of America — about deporting all undocumented people, rather than only criminals; about terminating DACA (again); about finding and firing “anti-American” college professors; about freezing out Democrats and even Republicans who are opposed to the Trumpian vision.
MAGA has gotten darker — but also smarter. That’s why it’s likely that the inaugural address will be less fiery than 2017’s, even if the agenda is even more extreme.
