Everything is pretty much hunky dory, President Barack Obama said in his farewell speech, yet, in his inaugural speech, President Donald Trump said very nearly the opposite. Trump is right. For all that’s going well, too much is going terribly wrong, but don’t count this as pessimism: Trump promises change.
Maybe he won’t accomplish his goals, and some of his methods may be amiss, but the inauguration was enough to lift all but the most forlorn spirits, speaking to what does in fact remain wonderful about these United States.
Here was our peaceful transfer of power, something kept in place by acknowledged legitimacy. Its specialness in a world of coups, corrupt dealings and inherited authority was underlined by the red, white and blue wherever you looked, the music that said hallelujah to the soul and the good cheer on most of the faces.
Something wrong even here, however, was all the Democratic members of Congress who boycotted the affair, having failed to choose someone like Abraham Lincoln as their model but Colin Kaepernick instead. Just as this San Francisco 49ers quarterback refuses to stand for the national anthem as a way to express his grievances, they figured insulting America a way to hit back at Trump. But at least they were not Chris Matthews, the MSNBC foul-ball artist.
He used the word “Hitlerian” in describing the Trump speech, putting himself in the company of some of the vilest flap-jaws around. His more physical comrades in arms managed to mix vandalism with their DC protests, all of this pointing, of course, to American disunity.
A Gallup poll in November showed Americans the most polarized on values in the history of its measurements. As epitomized by Black Lives Matter, racial tensions are the highest in years. In his Friday speech, Trump called for unity as a crucial need in America. He talked about a new national pride healing divisions, saying it is “time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.”
Some other concerns expressed in his speech:
Schools. Despite huge amounts of money being spent on them, various tests have repeatedly shown they are not doing the job for our children. One answer, as Trump believes and Obama agreed, is charter schools. They are less union-prone and offer more experimentation and enormous promise.
Unsafe neighborhoods. Incredibly, Trump critics have missed the statistical evidence from the FBI and others of a significant increase in homicides in our large cities, and they also do not seem to know that the foremost, evidentially supported answer is strategic police work that allows stop-and-frisk. Obama made nothing but wrong moves on this front, and a consequence is blood in the streets.
Jobs. Trump’s ideas about tariffs are off-base and he had better watch the spending on infrastructure. But lowering corporate taxes and repatriating corporate profits from overseas to our shores could lead to expansion and a swarm of new opportunities. We have a working class right now that is suffering terribly, even to the point of a frightening increase in suicides and alcoholism, and you know he is going to fight unremittingly for them.
Trump’s speech was characterized as too “dark,” but an insufficiently discussed fact is that, Obamacare or no Obamacare, Americans are right now dying at a rate unmatched in the past decade. In fact, we are the only country in the Western world in which the death rate is increasing instead of declining, and how can anyone argue that this means things are overall OK?
What Trump said in his short, muscular, down-to-earth speech is that we the people will fix things, not a Republican and Democratic establishment that’s mastered its rhetoric but not adequate policies. His nationalism may have gone overboard and his populism may leave out important principles, but he still gave a rhetorical hug to allies, he has nominated Cabinet members who will test him on specifics and patriotism remains a virtue.
God love America.
By Jay Ambrose
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
