Inauguration TV Review: Trump and ‘Carnage’

There was no poetry read during the inauguration of Donald Trump early Friday afternoon. That’s not a surprise — only Democratic presidents, and only five of them, have invited poets to write some verse for the ceremony. But by any measure, the speech that President Trump gave after being sworn in as the 45th president was anti-poetry, deploying blunt, sometimes brutal directness in a speech devoted to the theme of “America first.”

Related: Complete Inauguration 2017 Coverage

“It’s going to be only America first, America first,” said Trump, who gave a raised-fist salute at both the start and the finish of his speech. In a phrase that was immediately taken up and spread like wildfire on social media, Trump invoked “American carnage”: “The crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen so many lives… This American carnage stops right here, right now.” Of course, to those who oppose Trump, “American carnage” became one more bit of foreshadowing of the gloom-and-doom Trump’s critics believe his presidency ushers in. On CBS, anchor Scott Pelley said, “This will be known forever as ‘The American Carnage Speech,’” and the newsman said that Trump wasn’t speaking to all of America, but rather, “he was speaking to, and only to, the people who got him elected.”

In Trump’s phrases were bits and pieces magpied from his campaign speeches — that we’ll be “winning again, winning like never before”; “buy American, hire American”; “rebuild our country and restore its promise.” There was ardent populism in his message: “This moment is your moment,” he said looking beyond the government officials and out to the crowd. “It belongs to you.” The apex of this tone was reached when Trump said, “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

The TV commentators were eager to dissect the speech. On Fox News, Chris Wallace said Trump’s address signaled that “there’s a new sheriff in town, and he made it clear.” Wallace took the “American carnage” phrase in a positive way, as Trump’s way of assuring the country that he’ll fight for the disadvantaged.

By contrast, on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow had her own description of the speech: “It was militant and it was stark.” She gave her audience a quick mini-history lesson in the reason that citizens with a sense of history might be unsettled by Trump’s invocation of “America first,” reminding viewers that Charles Lindbergh had led the “America First Committee,” which, like Trump, opposed globalism in favor of fierce nationalism, and has, said Maddow, “very dark echoes in American history: The America First Committee was infiltrated by the Nazis; many of them were anti-Semitic… ” Her conclusion: “It’s hard to hear.”

On CNN, Jake Tapper said Trump’s speech was the “most radical inaugural speech we’ve ever heard.” Switch over to NBC, and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt was saying of Trump’s speech that “it was grim. There is typically much more joy on this day.”

And so the early reviews are in: President Trump remains the Trump we knew before he put his hand on the Bible to take the oath of the office of the presidency. Did anyone doubt this would be so?