Trump’s Inauguration Speech Threatened New Depths of State Cruelty

It matters what presidents say in their inauguration speeches. The words set the tone for what follows. They do so, whether the president succeeds or fails.

Go back to Barack Obama’s first inauguration speech, and what you notice now is language itself breaking under the pressure that president placed on it. He encouraged Americans to believe that theirs was still a land of opportunity, that journeys like his own could endlessly be repeated. Obama noted what he’d achieved, by winning the election, so that “a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.” Obama needed words to act like magic. All his elegant phrases had an intended purpose. A nod toward the financial crisis as “a consequence of greed and irresponsibility” was an attempt to prompt humility in how the rich and powerful ruled the U.S. and the world. The plan seems quixotic now — why should the rich care about being nice, if they might instead be ever greedier, ever more powerful, ever more dominant in relation to the rest of us?

In Donald Trump’s first inauguration speech, the message was sinister. Notably, the 2017 speech repeatedly implies his supporters are the new poor, the new wretched of the Earth. This is the Republican Party of 2017 we are talking about, after all; still the party of the WASPs, of old money and Wall Street influence, and a voting base which was still significantly more affluent than its Democratic counterpart. Nonetheless, Trump called his supporters “the people,” “struggling families” and “American workers.”

That first move led him to a second deceit. Why were the workers poor? His answer was the Democrats. “A small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government,” Trump told his audience. As an argument, it made no sense — the likes of Tim Walz or even Nancy Pelosi aren’t struggling, but their wealth isn’t a tenth of Donald Trump’s. Whatever they have gained from collaborating in workers’ exploitation, he has taken many times more. Trump didn’t need his inauguration speech to be accurate or logical. What he wanted was something else. “Washington flourished,” he said, “but the people did not share in its wealth … while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.” Trump had already set himself the goal of building a private movement, one that would be loyal to him personally, and go wherever he led it. He and his speechwriters were setting in place the rhetorical strategies that would culminate four years later with Trump promising to “fight like hell,” as his supporters attacked Capitol Hill.

Compare Trump’s two inauguration speeches, and some of the biggest differences are in the context. In 2017, Trump announced no more than two executive orders on the day of his inauguration, and one of them was a policy he hated — keeping the Affordable Care Act going. Eight years later, Trump used his speech to announce, supposedly, 200 executive orders. He promised to “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” a mechanism, in other words, to create a near future in which those who travel for work are not just deported, but are treated as outside the law, so that any amount of violence against them is legitimate.

In 2017, the best ally Trump had by way of a foreign political celebrity was Britain’s Nigel Farage, a man who had stood seven times for Parliament in the U.K. without ever being elected to anything. Eight years later, Farage has at last won his seat, while Trump’s inauguration was attended by much more significant figures, including the elected leaders of Italy and Argentina, one of them the leader of a party founded by fascists, the other a libertarian who is tearing up Argentina’s safety nets against poverty.

In 2017, Trump promised that he would stand for U.S. workers. In truth, this was more a case of twisted partisan myth-making than anything likely to meaningfully improve a single worker’s life. By 2025, that part of Trump’s rhetoric has vanished. He boasted instead that “some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country” were watching the inauguration alongside him.

In his speech on Monday, Trump pledged to protect both himself, and those who had taken part in the January 6 insurrection, from investigation. After he’d finished, the Proud Boys — a neo-fascist militia — marched for him.

Trump also promised to create a new epoch of intentional discrimination against trans people. In a context where more than half of states have already taken measures to restrict access to gender-affirming care, Trump pledged that federal policy will insist “there are only two genders.” To trans people, and to the most vulnerable people in society, Trump has only one promise — to make their lives even worse.

In response to previous attempts to prevent climate catastrophe, under which the world’s governments have pledged to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, Trump promised to “drill, baby, drill.” He and his backers know, of course, that you cannot increase oil production without causing the world’s glaciers to melt, without making species extinct and without causing the sorts of wildfires that we can see now, even in winter, on our TV screens.

The problem is not that Trump doesn’t understand what will happen next. He, and the oil barons, see that future and predict that they will become so much richer, so fast, that they personally can maintain something like their present living standards.

Meanwhile, the majority of Trump’s supporters will see their living standards collapse dramatically. The wager Trump offers, then, is that these supporters may suffer just slightly less than the people they hate — those who are fractionally poorer, those born on the other side of the border, those with the “wrong” gender, sexuality or racial identity — who will find it even harder to survive.

The violence promised by Trump isn’t accidental. The cruelty is the point.