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Rex Murphy: Trump delivered a plain, serious and monumental promise to give Washington back to the people
Rex Murphy | January 20, 2017 9:22 PM ET
Donald Trump is not an orator. Rather he’s a man with a plain message, which he delivers plainly.
Donald John Trump delivered the starkest Inaugural Address of modern times. It was so far out of the mode as to be unique: unembroidered, direct, with little flourish, one message and brief. The government belongs to the citizens was the message.
It works for the citizens. It does not exist, is not for the benefit of, nor is it owned by those who practice politics, or who live off the administration, practices or management of politics.
He is in Washington, the dew-fresh president said, to serve Americans first. And most particularly those Americans who have not shared, to a just extent, in the benefits and wealth of 20th– and 21st-century technological and communicational advances. He calls them, rightly, the forgotten Americans. And pledges they will not be forgotten again.
Now it is a large question whether a pledge of this magnitude and emotional depth can really be fulfilled. In a very real way it is a larger promise, a larger summons than was ever made by Barack Obama, ringing so perfectly, as the orator he was, the chimes of Hope and Change. Trump’s promise is visceral not rhetorical; it is particular — it is reaching down to the jobless, to the gang- and murder-torn inner cities, to those in economic torment, and saying this is really going to change for all of you.
This is a steel yardstick he has set for himself.
For to the people listening for just that message, and by virtue of the emphatic, convicted tone he adopted in making it a fundamental pledge, he has made what I will call a real promise. Either the anxieties, the disenchantments, the woes of the many left behind and forgotten are, to some extent, dispelled in the next four years, or they will not be. His success will register unfailingly, or not.
Trump has no cloud of semantics or rhetorical overflight to hide behind. He has given himself no cover. This is not the famous blank slate of Barack Obama. Trump, in his bare 15 minutes or so made a commitment that reaches to the particular lives and welfare of individual Americans, and the measurement of that commitment is thereby in the hands and hearts of every American to whom he made it. Their lives will either be better in four years or not, and there is no pillar behind which Mr. Trump can hide, nor I suspect will he seek to hide, if he cannot keep it.
The brevity of the speech had one unintended obscurity, or rather acted to obscure how momentous the Trump ascendancy threatens or promises to be. Just how much of a radical shift, a convulsion, that the moment of its occasion represented. Trump has virtually cleared the table of politics as it has been practiced and played for over a generation. He has bulldozed the old verities of political practice. He has shattered the codes of party politics, routed the tired mages of the political panels, the think tanks and NGOs. And he has utterly bypassed the hollow practices of virtue signalling and the insidious tribalism of identity politics. And as for the claustrophobic thought-amputations of political correctness, he has, correctly, shown nothing but scorn and dismissal. This is a wholesale reworking of the mode and understanding of modern American politics.
Rex Murphy | January 20, 2017 9:22 PM ET
Donald Trump is not an orator. Rather he’s a man with a plain message, which he delivers plainly.
Donald John Trump delivered the starkest Inaugural Address of modern times. It was so far out of the mode as to be unique: unembroidered, direct, with little flourish, one message and brief. The government belongs to the citizens was the message.
It works for the citizens. It does not exist, is not for the benefit of, nor is it owned by those who practice politics, or who live off the administration, practices or management of politics.
He is in Washington, the dew-fresh president said, to serve Americans first. And most particularly those Americans who have not shared, to a just extent, in the benefits and wealth of 20th– and 21st-century technological and communicational advances. He calls them, rightly, the forgotten Americans. And pledges they will not be forgotten again.
Now it is a large question whether a pledge of this magnitude and emotional depth can really be fulfilled. In a very real way it is a larger promise, a larger summons than was ever made by Barack Obama, ringing so perfectly, as the orator he was, the chimes of Hope and Change. Trump’s promise is visceral not rhetorical; it is particular — it is reaching down to the jobless, to the gang- and murder-torn inner cities, to those in economic torment, and saying this is really going to change for all of you.
This is a steel yardstick he has set for himself.
For to the people listening for just that message, and by virtue of the emphatic, convicted tone he adopted in making it a fundamental pledge, he has made what I will call a real promise. Either the anxieties, the disenchantments, the woes of the many left behind and forgotten are, to some extent, dispelled in the next four years, or they will not be. His success will register unfailingly, or not.
Trump has no cloud of semantics or rhetorical overflight to hide behind. He has given himself no cover. This is not the famous blank slate of Barack Obama. Trump, in his bare 15 minutes or so made a commitment that reaches to the particular lives and welfare of individual Americans, and the measurement of that commitment is thereby in the hands and hearts of every American to whom he made it. Their lives will either be better in four years or not, and there is no pillar behind which Mr. Trump can hide, nor I suspect will he seek to hide, if he cannot keep it.
The brevity of the speech had one unintended obscurity, or rather acted to obscure how momentous the Trump ascendancy threatens or promises to be. Just how much of a radical shift, a convulsion, that the moment of its occasion represented. Trump has virtually cleared the table of politics as it has been practiced and played for over a generation. He has bulldozed the old verities of political practice. He has shattered the codes of party politics, routed the tired mages of the political panels, the think tanks and NGOs. And he has utterly bypassed the hollow practices of virtue signalling and the insidious tribalism of identity politics. And as for the claustrophobic thought-amputations of political correctness, he has, correctly, shown nothing but scorn and dismissal. This is a wholesale reworking of the mode and understanding of modern American politics.
