Trump’s Inaugural Address Was a Missed Opportunity - Rob Horowitz
Rób Horowitz, MINDSETTER™
Trump’s Inaugural Address Was a Missed Opportunity - Rob Horowitz
The speech was also indifferently delivered. Mr. Trump’s strengths as a communicator, including his sense of humor and gifts of timing, were mainly absent. The potentially powerful concluding poetic lines, for instance, were undermined by his robotic reading of them off the teleprompter as if the president was seeing that part of the speech for the first time.
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As previewed by some of his key aides, the speech did make a number of references to unity. Unfortunately, the references were empty, devoid of any positive recognition or grace notes for his political opponents or outreach to the majority of American voters who did not support him. In a typical example, Mr. Trump asserts that we are achieving unity simply because he won—not because of any unifying steps he plans to take: “National unity is now returning to America, and confidence and pride is soaring like never before,” he declared.
A glaring missed opportunity came later in the speech when he said, “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” citing the returning of the hostages yesterday as an example without mentioning the way his team and Biden’s team worked closely together to bring it about. That was a prime example of unity. Mentioning it would have demonstrated a generosity of spirit that would have redounded to Mr. Trump’s credit.
On full display, however, was Mr. Trump’s trademark grandiosity. Abraham Lincoln, who took on the challenges of the Civil War and ending slavery, and FDR, who faced the Great Depression and World War II, for example, would be surprised to learn that “over the past eight years” Mr. Trump was “tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” Similarly, he remarked that he hopes his election is “remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country." Along the same lines, referring to the failed assassination attempt, the president said that it was his belief that “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
As we've come to expect, Mr. Trump’s speech was full of falsehoods and exaggerations ranging from mischaracterizing the current state of the LA fires to presenting an inaccurate picture of the operation and history of the Panama Canal to describing the level of crime across the nation in a way that is greatly at odds with reality.
One place where President Trump was on target; the next 4 years do present some great opportunities for this nation both at home and abroad. As any economist will tell you, the economy is on a solid foundation upon which Mr. Trump has the opportunity to build. In the Middle East and in Ukraine, the degrading of the military strength of Iran and Russia respectively provide ripe strategic opportunities to advance peaceful solutions.
While this inaugural speech was not a great beginning, my hope is that President Trump and his administration focus on the major challenges facing our nation—not the score-settling, personal aggrandizement and authoritarian instincts that too often get in the way. He has an opportunity to make a positive difference. That will mean, however, resisting the temptation to indulge his darkest instincts and finally recognizing that he is president of all the people, even the ones that don’t support him.