WASHINGTON – For 236 years, since George Washington, a newly elected president's inaugural address has traditionally served multiple purposes.
One is simply to mark the beginning of a new administration with joy and hope – and occasionally a dose of eloquence.
Another, equally important aspect is to try to unite the country as much as possible after the rancor of a divisive election campaign.
It wasn't meant to be a campaign speech; The time for the election campaign is over. This is not a list of programs and policies; Instead, speeches such as the “State of the Nation” will be given later.
“You want to unite the country – because if you don't, you're just the people who won and the people who lost,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, co-author of two books on the speeches Presidents.
“A commencement address should focus on the things we have in common, not everything that divides us,” she said. “You want to see a president who is for you, even if you didn’t vote for him.”
This has been the basic model since Washington delivered the first model in New York in 1789.
Until Donald Trump, anyway.
When Trump began his first term as president in 2017, he made some allusions to unity. “We are one nation,” he admitted. But he spent much of his speech attacking politicians from both parties who had opposed him.
And he painted the United States as a crime-ridden hellscape of “rusted factories scattered like tombstones.”
“This American carnage will stop here and now,” he promised.
One of his Republican predecessors, George W. Bush, made a succinct statement afterwards: “That was some weird shit,” he said to Hillary Clinton, who was sitting next to him at the ceremony.
Trump's divisive tone was deliberate.
“We didn’t win an election to bring the country together,” said his adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who helped write the speech. The goal was to “take on the elites with a blowtorch.”
Trump is scheduled to begin his second four-year term with another inaugural speech on Monday. He promises that this time will be different.
“It will be a message of unity,” he said last month. “No American carnage.”
That would be a pleasant surprise. After all, we've seen this movie before and it turned out to be a decoy. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump aides predicted that the former president, who narrowly escaped death in an assassination attempt days earlier, would present a new, more thoughtful personality — a “softer version,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump suggested .
This kinder, gentler Trump lasted about 20 minutes. At the start of his acceptance speech, New Trump urged both sides not to “demonize political differences.” A few minutes later, the old Trump reappeared, demonizing “crazy Nancy Pelosi” for “destroying our country.”
To be fair, it was in the middle of a hard-fought election campaign – one in which Trump also called Democrats “vermin” and accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
However, Trump has now ended his last presidential election. (Trump has joked about seeking a third term, but his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said last week that the Constitution was standing in his way.)
His main goal is likely to make his second term a success – and Monday's speech gives him a chance to start on the right foot by reaching out to voters who didn't support him.
The justification for such a Trump-unlike move would not be sentimental. It is a question of practical politics.
Trump won the popular vote last year but narrowly missed a majority. His approval ratings have reached a record high in recent polls, but are still below 50%. He claims his election gave him a mandate, but it was tenuous and mostly focused on concerns about inflation and immigration.
Still, he is tantalizingly close to majority support for the first time. His inauguration gives him an opportunity to build a broader coalition — but only if he acts as the president of all Americans, not just the president of his aggrieved base.
Republican strategist Karl Rove, who worked for the quotable George W. Bush, explained the practical arguments for magnanimity in the Wall Street Journal:
“Trump has a chance to… solidify reluctant supporters — and even convert some critics — if he delivers a strong inaugural speech and sets an optimistic tone,” Rove wrote.
“Americans want Mr. Trump to talk about hope, not carnage, to bring the country together to address important challenges rather than divide it over pettiness and threats of retaliation,” he added.
Trump's first term was a failure to pass legislation. He won a big tax cut — the easy part — but failed when he tried to repeal Obamacare and didn't even deliver the big infrastructure bill he promised in his first inaugural address.
If he changes his tone this time, Rove advises, “he'll find that he can get more from both parties in Congress with honey than with vinegar.”
During the election campaign, Trump made his main political goals clear: new tax cuts, high tariffs and a mass deportation campaign.
These do not have to be the focus of Monday's speech. The inaugural address is an opportunity to set out broad goals, a basic vision and the principles by which he intends to govern.
The safe bet is still that the Trump who speaks at the Capitol will be the familiar, divisive old Trump – the man history will remember for bringing “American carnage” and “vermin” into our political lexicon has recorded.
But an inauguration is an opportunity to offer voters a measure of hope and the promise of a better future.
If Trump wants to go behind the scenes, he could take a cue from a previous Republican president who took office in a bitterly divided country: Abraham Lincoln, whose first inauguration took place six weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War.
“We must not be enemies…” Lincoln said. “The mystical chords of remembrance that extend from every battlefield and every patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone across this vast land will swell the chorus of the Union when, as it surely will be, it is once more spoken of “The better angels touch our nature.”