The Worst Part of a Terrible Speech.

Let me get this out of the way.

Jan 21, 2025

This photo was from a rally in Butler, Pa., a few weeks before the election. But it captured the dignity, eloquence, and plutocrat-centrism of the ceremony today in the Capitol. (Photo Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images.)

Through the next stage of my life—personal, professional, civic, family—and through the next stage of our national life, I have determined to do my best to rise above the minute-by-minute distraction that Donald Trump has brought upon the world.

Some of the reasons for such a shift are obvious, for mental-health reasons. Some are less so, and I’ll mention them at the end.

But having put in a few early-morning hours today, watching the inaugural spectacle from the Pacific time zone, I want to mention one particularly egregious part of an overall bottom-of-the-barrel inaugural address.

This post will have three parts: About the “speech” as a whole, about its most fatuous segment, and about our next-stage plans.

A really bad speech, which was a bookend with its predecessor.

Why was this speech the bottom of the barrel?

I’m one of the few people you’ll find who has read all 59 previous Inaugural Addresses, and survived. (I read the first 40-odd in preparation for helping write one, long ago, and I’ve kept up the practice.)

Many of these speeches are tedious, and unmemorable. The longest of all, and remembered only for oddball reasons, was William Henry Harrison’s, in 1840. It weighed in at almost 10,000 words, and took some two hours for Harrison to deliver. This one is memorable only because1 Harrison, then 68 years old, got sick in the cold and rainy weather and died less than a month later.

See if you can glean a pattern from this ranked list of shortest-ever inaugural addresses:

George Washington - 135 words - March 4, 1793
Franklin D. Roosevelt - 559 words - January 20, 1945 (FDR's 4th inauguration)
Abraham Lincoln - 700 words - March 4, 1865
Theodore Roosevelt - 984 words - March 4, 1905

Hmmm. Three of the four people on Mt. Rushmore had the shortest addresses ever. Probably just a coincidence.2

This one today was quite long, roughly 2,900 words. (The one I worked on was only 1,200 words long.) Nearly all of those 2,900 words today put the speech in a category different from all other inaugural addresses except for Trump’s “American carnage” address eight years ago.

Here are a few aspects that made the speech and event bad, in my no-doubt-biased view:

Elon Musk, as 3rd-grader. Musk, once known as an industrialist, now is identified with childish rah-rah for Donald Trump. Today he didn’t leap across the stage, as he had at rallies before the election. (As shown in the lead image on this post.) But at several points he gave school-child-type “rah-rah” raised-arms gestures in listening to Trump’s speech. And at a rally afterwards, he twice gave a full Nazi salute. (“Never go Full Nazi. Especially twice.”)
Here he was today at the post-ceremony celebrations at Capital One Arena. Our parents’ generation fought against the Nazis. Now we have someone who was grinning and clapping during an inaugural address, giving the Nazi salute, at an event for the new leader.
You do don’t this by accident. I’m a generation older than Musk. As far as I’m aware, I have never given a Nazi salute. Let alone twice, on national TV, at a swearing-in ceremony.
Donald Trump, as 5th-grader. Sometimes Trump’s formal speeches are “written,” in the sense of trying to have “eloquent” or “fine writing” passages. But these “fancy” parts of a speech—related to the parts we remember as the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—are clearly tough sledding for Trump. You can tell that he plods his way through these obligatory passages, in the fashion of a fifth-grader called upon to read to the classroom from an assigned text. Halting, not sure of the words, pausing from time to time at a passage he’d never seen before, as if to say, “Hey, that’s actually interesting!”

What he likes, is the crowd-surfing and the riffing. And he gave us a lot of that. Read it for yourself, if you so choose. I listened in real time. I don’t recommend it, because it was just another MAGA rally speech.
After the speech, JD Vance told Trump something to the effect of, “That was a hell of a speech.” Yes.
Melania Trump, as 7th grader. That hat! The body-language of public officials is usually meant to signal: I understand you. I am one of you. I am close rather than distant.

That’s why Jimmy Carter carried his own luggage out of airplanes. It’s why other presidents have tried to win on the “would you like to have a beer with him?” test. Seeming accessible is Politics 101.

I am not an expert on body-language or clothing-language. But to a layman, everything about her attire, and her hat!!!!, signified: Stay away! “I really don’t care, do you?” Noli me tangere (“don’t touch me”), as the Filipino novelst Jose Rizal my ~~late Filipino friend, F. Sionil Jose~~ [Sorry for error] put it in a book title. Even when Trump tried to peck her on the cheek, the hat brim prevented him from getting close enough. Accident? Intention? We’ll never know.
First lady of all the people. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

It’s only natural that a pure-merit-based system, run by Jeff Bezos (owner of the ailing Washington Post) would pay $40 million for rights to her life story. Maybe they’ll have a segment about the hat. Almost as heartening as Jared Kushner getting big deals from the Saudis! The American dream is alive.
And speaking of merit-based, “saved by God”:
One of the lines calculated for applause in Trump’s speech was this.
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Three weeks before his first-term inauguration in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was nearly killed by an assassin’s shot in Florida. The mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, was next to him, and died from the gunshot.
Did FDR say that he was “saved by God” to lead the country, in his inaugural address?
No.
Can I say anything good about this speech? Sure. He didn’t go into pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists.

The BS about Panama.

The absolutely stupidest part of this speech was this. Any other public official would be embarrassed even to say something of this sort:

We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

If your second grader gave you this thought, you’d be having a little talk about how history and geography worked.

But second prize for stupidness goes to this, about Panama. I’ve highlighted the parts I’ll mention below:

The Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… think of this, [the US] spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.
We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made. And Panama's promise to us has been broken. The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form, and that includes the United States Navy.
And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back.

What’s wrong here? I summed it up a couple of weeks ago, after a trip to Panama. But as a reminder:

Casualties. Building the canal was an enormous, costly enterprise, in which tens of thousands of people died, mainly from disease. But most of them died during French management of the project, before the Americans got started. And most of the deaths were among laborers from the Caribbean, not Trump’s kind of “real Americans.”
‘Gift that should never have been made.’ Having been there at the time, I can tell you that the impetus for the Canal transfer under Jimmy Carter was mainly from the US military. Generals and security experts were more and more concerned that the Canal would be impossible to defend, given mounting Panamanian-US tensions from the holdover-colonial status of the Canal Zone. Negotiations for the transfer began under Richard Nixon. They continued under Gerald Ford. Under Carter the new arrangement got 68 votes in the US Senate.
‘Panama’s promise has been broken.’ No. Give us an example. This is not true.
‘America has been severely overcharged.’ No. There’s a standard list of charges. This is a tell (one of many) that Trump doesn’t know what he is talking about.
‘China is operating the Panama Canal.’ No. Ports on both the Pacific and the Caribbean/Atlantic side of the Canal are operated by CK Hutchinson, a long-standing Hong Kong-based logistics firm. More important: When Panama actually took a pro-China step, in switching its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC in 2017, the US president was Donald Trump—who did not say a single word about the change.
And now, what is the main force pushing Panama into China’s orbit? It is the rash “we’re taking it back” rhetoric from Trump—nuts enough on its own, but so far not getting pushback from “responsible” officials in the GOP.

The whole speech was bad. This was badder.

Westward ho.

Deb and I are proud and loyal citizens of Washington DC. We’ve owned a house there, which we love, for decades. We vote there. We pay taxes there. Both of our sons were born and mostly raised there. We’ve seen the city get better and better over the decades.

But around every decade, Deb and I have intentionally moved from DC to some place else. Keeping our house there, usually renting it out, and exposing ourselves to new places, new problems, new opportunities, new in general.

When our kids were very little, we lived in Texas. (Then back to DC.) When they were in grade school, we lived for several years in Japan and Malaysia. (Then back to DC.) When they went to college, we spent three years in Seattle and Berkeley. (Then back to DC.) When they were out of college, we moved to China for four years. (Then back.)

And eight years ago, at the beginning of the first term of Donald Trump, we took off in our little airplane for a long stretch in the California homeland, where we wrote the Our Towns book. This is how it looked before we took off from Gaithersburg airport, outside DC, in freezing weather shortly before the first Trump swearing in. (We got to Demopolis, Alabama, that night.)

This past weekend we arrived in California again (this time via United Airlines), and will be here at least through the summer. The idea is to immerse ourselves in, and write about, developments in American life other than the latest abomination from the White House. For instance: The under-publicized CalVolunteers program, which is already bigger than the Peace Corps and is setting an example of how to promote civic engagement in a dis-engaged age.

I’ve gotten this horrible speech in DC out of my system. Next I’ll tell you what I’m seeing around me here.

Sample of how Harrison’s windy speech began, after the intro remarks:

It was the remark of a Roman consul in an early period of that celebrated Republic that a most striking contrast was observable in the conduct of candidates for offices of power and trust before and after obtaining them, they seldom carrying out in the latter case the pledges and promises made in the former. However much the world may have improved in many respects in the lapse of upward of two thousand years since the remark was made by the virtuous and indignant Roman, I fear that a strict examination of the annals of some of the modern elective governments would develop similar instances of violated confidence.
Although the fiat of the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union…

And so on.

The fourth person on Mt. Rushmore, Thomas Jefferson, had a first-inaugural address about 1,700 words long.