Since I had written speeches for Trump and his family in 2016, I was asked to provide an inauguration address for him. What I came up with was the kind of speech that Biden delivered today, a healing speech that reached back to earlier ones that had been given by Martin Luther King and JFK. But when I listened to Trump’s inaugural speech, from the balcony of the Canadian Embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue, I knew that my speechwriting days were over. Trump’s address was an angry, Bannonite screed devoid of any sense of graciousness.
Biden’s halting delivery today reminded us why a majority of Americans had supported him. It wasn’t his sparkling personality. Rather, he was Chance the gardener, the un-Trump. Americans had tired of the petulance and thin-skinned pettiness we had seen on January 20, 2017. Trump lacked Dwight Eisenhower’s reassuring manner and George W. Bush’s self-deprecating sense of humor. Such friends as he had, crude fixers like Michael Cohen or pushy sycophants like Anthony Scaramucci, made our flesh creep and we were happy to see the last of them. He brought in a few respected establishment figures, the Jim Mattises and Rex Tillersons, but he couldn’t persuade them to agree with him and they seldom lasted very long.
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