Here are some adjectives used in an inaugural address not so long ago: “crisis,” “ordeal,” “suffering,” “tyranny,” “dark,” “crime.”
It sounds pretty gloomy, no? Not uplifting? Surely an inaugural speech from a politician taking charge of a new administration should make his rhetoric more uplifting and inspiring?
That at least was what most pundits said after President Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20.
On the Capitol steps, Trump declared that there “was little to celebrate for struggling families,” and spoke of “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and of “crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen the lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
His message was widely agreed among commentators to be “dark,” and was roundly condemned by many of them as a failure for that reason.
But sometimes a dark picture seems like reality to vast numbers of those who hear it, and may indeed it be so. As Trump supporters on the National Mall told the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York that day, the new president’s inaugural speech seemed to mean “a return of optimism.”
How can this be?
First, let’s go back to the litany of gloom in the first paragraph of this blog post. It was spoken by Winston Churchill in his first speech as prime minister to Parliament. It was the speech in which he said he could offer nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Given the tendency of modern political debate toward disingenuous rebuttal, I should make plain immediately that I do not think Trump remotely Churchillian, and nor do I equate the circumstances of Britain in 1940 with those of the United States in 2017.
The point is, rather, that there are times, and both of these are among them, when a lot of people want a strong dose of what they believe is the hard and bitter truth, and they are encouraged when they get it. They are fed up with uplifting paeans to the promising present and a brighter future.
It is broadly accepted that one of the ways Churchill secured the support, buttressed the morale and spurred the endeavors of Britain, its Empire and, later, the rest of the free world, was by stripping away all gloss from the perils they confronted.
After the flimsy encouragements proffered by the appeasing Neville Chamberlain and his “piece of paper,” people seized on his successor’s frightening and blunt depiction of the challenges that lay ahead.
It made them feel that they at last had a leader who wasn’t spinning them (to use anachronistic terminology) and who was, by telling it how it was, put them in a position to begin the necessary fight back. They wanted the truth because they understood, as we all instinctively do, that you cannot build securely on falsehood, only on reality. That may end up being a problem for Trump.
But it is also why Trump’s dark rhetoric is refreshing to those who like it.
His casual and patchy relationship with the truth has made pundits scratch their heads when voters declare “he tells it like it is.” But when he speaks of “Islamic terrorism,” many people’s response is, “Finally, a leader who doesn’t flinch at the great challenge ahead and doesn’t try to bend reality to unconvincing modern pieties about cultural tolerance.”
Likewise, when he talks of rusted and idle factories scattered like tombstones, Trump is drawing a picture that looks to millions of people a lot like the picture they would draw themselves. For those at the sharp end of the dreary economic data of the past eight years, the new president’s rhetoric sounds the death knell of happy talk, and launches a grim realism that can be the foundation of remedial action.
So, although he does not talk of a shining city on a hill, Trump’s scowl and his expressions of angry determination over an 18-month campaign struck a chord on Election Day that resonated with the majority of voters in 30 of the 50 states. And it still resonates today.
