Peeling the orange
A speechwriter’s x-ray look at the inaugural speech finds something disturbing.
Donald Trump’s speeches used to haunt me because of my admittedly-misguided sympathy for his staff. (Imagine the poor devil who sweated blood writing Trump’s speaking notes, only to hear them chewed up and spit out as that weird verbal paste we’ve all grown used to.)
But as a speechwriter, I know to look past the weird tangents and the word salad that make up most of Trump’s speeches — to see the story that provides a streamlined spine for his deceptively flabby oratory.
And the story I’m seeing there haunts me far more than any sense of professional solidarity.
Most of the commentary about Trump’s inaugural address has focused on the tone (angry, vindictive) and delivery (plodding, pedantic, monotonous, joyless), along with the implications of some of his lines for public policy. But not the narrative. And that narrative is what has me the most worried, because it’s the story of an authoritarian strongman.
Let’s boil the speech down.
Once you strip away the empty rhetoric (and there’s a whole lot for someone who inveighs against politicians being “all talk”), Trump’s story boils down to this:
We’re transferring power from corrupt Washington to The People. The insiders have prospered while America has fallen into ruin: crumbling infrastructure, a collapsing military, a failed school system and cities wracked with crime, drugs and gangs.
Where’s the wealth that’s rightfully yours? It’s been “ripped from [the] homes” of the middle class and sent overseas to make other countries rich, subsidizing their military and propping up their economies.
What’s the solution? Put America first. Buy American and hire American. (Also, eradicate radical Islamic terrorism, but mostly put America first.)
What will we get? We’ll unlock the mysteries of space, disease and technology. America will win again. And our national pride will heal all our ills and divisions. Together, we will make America great again.
That’s a tight 15 minutes, and a very simple narrative. It’s just about the same story he told throughout the campaign.
(It also belongs almost entirely on the fiction shelf, from the setting, America as a desolate hellscape, to the plot, greedy foreigners siphoning all the wealth from a hapless middle class. Anyone who’d hoped the presidency would return Trump to the pre-post-truth era would have had their hopes dashed by this morning’s speech. Even casual fact-checking would turn up a fistful of outright lies.)
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
If that story strikes you as familiar, you aren’t wrong. Despite Trump’s campaign that his movement has no historical precedent, the story in Trump’s speech — much like his speaking style—follows the template of authoritarian leaders and demagogues before him:
- Tell people about their pain. Amplify it, exaggerate it, blow their sense of grievance up to titanic levels.
- Give them a scapegoat, someone on whom they can blame all their woes and anxieties. You were entitled to the keys to the kingdom, but you were stabbed in the back!
- Make yourself the only one they can trust to restore what’s rightfully theirs. All they have to do is hand you supreme power.
It’s not far off classic (and legitimate) formulas for persuasion, with the main difference being that it’s dishonest at every stage.
How does this story end?
“Grim and foreboding” is rarely the tone people look for in an inaugural speech. And foreboding it was. Appeals to resentment, suspicion of foreigners, fetishizing power and action over deliberation and thought: this speech ticked every box in the authoritarian checklist.
If an inauguration is a clue to how an incoming president intends to govern, then this one says Trump will do what he did in the nomination battle and the election. He’ll keep his base energized, and wield their most rabid elements like a cudgel. He’ll target every institution that could rival him for power, from Congress to the news media — aiming to subordinate them or elbow them aside into irrelevance.
So this speech won’t be remembered for its rhetoric, uplift or inspiration. But it may well be remembered as the first formal step America took down a very dark, dangerous path.
