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By Frank Bruni
Contributory Review Writer
“American Carnage” is gone. No prayer at Donald Trump’s inaugural moment stands up to distilled his rope like those terrifying words from his first.
But the recriminations that gave rise to them? The portrayal of the United States as a dystopia in desperate need of immediate rescue? Those were as vivid on Monday in the remarks that he delivered in the Capitol Rotunda as they were in the speech he made after taking the oath of office eight years ago.
And they were joined by a newly pronounced messianic streak. America’s 47th president — who was also our 45th president — told us that he is not merely on a quest to bring this country into line with his and the MAGA movement’s vision for it. He is on a divinely directed mission.
Recalling the day in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, when “a killer’s ball ripped my ear,” Trump said: “I felt, and even more so now, that my life was stored for a reason. I was stored up by God to make America great again.
This time it’s the gatekeeper: the narcissism of the Trump logo and old Grand himself, as well as a disturbing measure of theocracy, in a deeply disturbing sentence. And it is a sign of certainty that he feels about all the decrees he later promised, all the law he prefigured and all the changes, from a militarized border to a war opposed to the medal medal he swore to.
While Trump’s speech portions, the promise of national prosperity, a commitment to “national unity”, honest culture and yielded to the convention, there is a darkness in what such dispersed subtleties may not do so and not do. I would not sow inspiration. He realized and established scores.
He led through an endless litany of judicial cases with respect to the screws of the Democrats holding the government reins before today. Cleaning efforts in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene seek to involve forest fires in the Pacific Palisadas, inflation, projects similar to race and sex, regulations regarding fossil fuels, United States under different leaders of that he may not get anything. But he would fix everything. And take control of the Panama Canal along the way!
His strangely subdued manner contradicted a ludicrously colossal agenda and an even more colossal sense of self. It’s said that our most distinctive traits intensify as we age, and Trump is that maxim made president (again), his vindictiveness and vanity at their peak.
In one of the other maximum memorable lines of his speech, he said: “In the last 8 years, they have tried and challenged me more than any president in our 250 years of history. ” It is a criscatively reductive reading of American history. What God would say about it.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policies at the University of Duke, of the electronic book “The Age of Grevance”, and a contributing opinion writer. Write a weekly email bulletin. Threads instagram @frankbruni • faceebook
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