As nation reels, Trump’s focus is strength, not unity

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” President Donald Trump famously asserted at his 2017 inauguration.

Mothers and children are “trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” rusted-out factories are “scattered like tombstones,” crime and gangs and drugs have “stolen too many lives,” the new president darkly intoned, eschewing the call to unity that is the usual hallmark of an inaugural address.  

At a moment of relative peace and prosperity – the nation was already years into a historic period of economic recovery – the dystopian image seemed jarring to many. Still, the speech was classic Trump, fitting for a man elected to shake up a system that had alienated far too many Americans. 

Today, however, his words have the feel of foreshadowing for a United States laid low by pandemic, economic catastrophe, and massive social unrest over racial disparity.  

To be sure, no one could have