Trump’s speech was what any observer of his campaign rhetoric might have expected, for good and bad. Rooted in the view that contemporary American life is a nightmarish scene of unrelenting carnage, despair, and desolation caused by the simple unwillingness of our leaders to act in America’s interest, Trump’s rhetoric manages to exaggerate our problems and yet also exaggerate how easy it would be to solve them. It lets him set a low bar for himself yet also causes him to make promises no one could keep.
.. he believes that by building walls around our country we can break down the walls within our society.
.. Although I think it grossly understates the challenges of unity in our vast and diverse country, this is one serious answer to the challenge of solidarity in 21st century America, and it is in many respects a more coherent and appealing answer than the one the Left tends to propose.
.. The speech he delivered was normal for him, but not for presidential inaugural addresses.
.. He did not really run to occupy the presidency as it exists, and does not seem to think of himself as stepping now into a role he is obliged to carry out. He ran to disrupt a broken system, and to be himself but with more power and authority. He is our president, but he has not taken on the job with any clear sense of the presidency as a distinct function and office which he should now stretch and bend to embody.
.. This has not been easy to accept, and so we have tended implicitly to wait for the moment when Trump would put aside his childish antics and step up into the role.
.. Trump seems inclined to leave largely unfilled the part traditionally played by the president in our system while playing another part formed around the peculiar contours of his bombastic, combative, and at times surely disordered personality. That means that Trump’s team, the Congress, the courts, and the public will need to confront the implications of both the absence of a more traditional president and the presence of a different and unfamiliar kind of figure at the heart of the constitutional order. These are two distinct problems.
.. The presence of a bombastic populist in the White House could force some common sense on a political culture too dominated by abstract sloganeering.
.. And in foreign policy it looks likely to undermine the post-World War II system of liberal-democratic alliances in which the President of the United States has had a distinct role to play for seven decades, about which Trump appears to know or care very little. And the presence of an undisciplined, aggressive performance artist at the heart of our system of government, a figure whose excesses are not structurally counterbalanced by others in the system (in the way that the excesses of the traditional presidency are), could alter the public’s expectations of government and politics in ways decidedly unhelpful to American constitutionalism.
.. Instead, to a greater degree than any modern president, his time in office seems likely to be shaped by his own character and personality. This is not good news.