https://www.city-journal.org/article/donald-trump-inauguration-speech
As he assumed the presidency again, Donald Trump proclaimed a “revolution of common sense” in his second Inaugural Address at the U.S. Capitol. Surrounded by the political elite and the captains of Silicon Valley, the new president pledged to restore faith in American institutions and championed a “manifest destiny into the stars,” with the United States expanding its territory and even planting a flag on Mars. The speech highlighted Trump’s many contrasts with his predecessors, even as it revealed how his political model has evolved.
Many recent presidents have used their Inaugurals to offer an ambitious vision for the nation or to rearticulate the terms of the national compact. Joe Biden’s, for instance, made a case for American “unity.” Some presidents have also sounded broad ideological themes, as in George W. Bush’s 2005 Inaugural Address, which committed the United States to the “expansion of freedom in all the world.”
But a series of disappointments and an embattled sense of national identity form the backdrop for the populist disruption of which Trump has been the avatar. His first Inaugural in 2017 lamented “American carnage,” and his second picked up that theme in assailing his predecessor’s record. Two signature moments of the end of the Biden administration—Biden’s bizarre attempt to “affirm” the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and his wave of preemptive pardons for his family and political allies—set up Trump’s denunciation of a “radical and corrupt establishment.”
Positioning himself against that establishment is essential to Trump’s outsider appeal, but his speech did not confine itself to complaint. Trump laid out a detailed set of policies that he would be implementing through executive orders.