Analysis: Trump got the last laugh, but the hard part begins after second inaugural address

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump got the last laugh, beating a slew of criminal charges without punishment and defeating his political foes. His reward: dealing with often-clashing Republicans in Congress.

The president-elect is scheduled to return to Washington this weekend to kick off the capital city’s quadrennial pomp and circumstance around a new presidential term. But a lot has changed since he delivered his first inaugural address eight long years ago.

When Trump arrives, he will do so with a tighter grip on the Republican Party than when he left town in January 2021, a greater ability to influence the media and an unexpected declaration that he has “changed.”

Trump used his 2017 address to portray a country that had descended into an economic hellscape he referred to as “American carnage.” In the run-up to his second inauguration, however, he has vowed to usher in a “Golden Age of America.”

Expect Trump to focus his address on several main issues, said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell: paring inflation, extending his 2017 tax cuts, the southern border and immigration, public safety, and maximizing the domestic production of oil and gas.

Outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both took their best shots at the president-elect during an unprecedented general election but failed to turn back his political comeback, even after he had amassed 91 criminal charges.

‘Maybe we all changed’

Trump will take the oath of office Monday afternoon indoors inside the Capitol Rotunda, an allowance made for expected freezing temperatures. Moments later, he will watch Biden and Harris depart the Capitol’s East Front as private citizens — a scenario the Democratic duo long warned would essentially mark the end of America’s democratic system. Yet, some Biden administration officials this week have praised Trump and his team for helping to secure a long-sought ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

Biden himself said Wednesday afternoon that they worked as “one team” to close the deal. Paradoxically, a few hours later, during his farewell address, Biden alluded to Trump and his allies by warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms — and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

For his part, Trump was asked last week about technology sector executives coming to meet with him at his Florida resort, something that did not happen before his first term.

“Maybe we all changed. I think they’ve gained a lot of respect,” he said. “I think they looked at the mandate that we got; as you know, we won the popular vote” and “we won all seven swing states,” Trump added, noting that some financial sector bigwigs also recently made the trek to Mar-a-Lago. “I also think it’s like, ‘Let’s get something done.’”

Notably, congressional Democrats have not reacted to his every contentious statement, nomination or social media post with the loud shock and ire of his first transition eight years ago.

“I haven’t had anybody saying anything bad about me. I’m not used to it,” Trump said last week.

Another thing that has changed: the GOP, which Trump has remade in his own image. Still, the speech provides a chance to wrangle the hard-liners in the House Republican Conference who have shown a willingness to buck him and Speaker Mike Johnson on occasion.

Trump’s speech, according to O’Connell, is likely to include a veiled message to those members: “The American people are behind me.”

“You’ve got two years, and Trump knows what he wants to do. It’ll be up to those Republicans in Congress to get behind him,” O’Connell said Friday in a phone interview.

Trump’s address is also more likely to focus on a new “Golden Age” than reprise the 2017 “carnage” narrative, said O’Connell, who expects “a positive, forward-looking speech about restoring America,” including, in part, restoration of “the First Amendment and the rights of the individual.”

‘Vision-casting speech’

One Republican lawmaker said he expects Trump to lay out where he intends to steer the country.

“He’s had four years to think about what he wants to be able to do, and I think he’ll be very focused on what are the key things that he wants to get done, and how do we do those as a country, together,” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said.

Asked whether he expects Trump to use the Monday address to drill down on specific policies he intends to pursue during his second term, Lankford chuckled.

“I doubt he’ll go into much detail. That’s not typically his style,” said Lankford, a member of the Homeland Security and Intelligence committees. “It’s a vision-casting speech. I don’t know of any president that’s gone into much detail. It’s more of a vision, a ‘who do we need to be as Americans’ speech. That’s the moment.”

Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said he expects the inaugural address to be “classic Trump.”

“I suspect he’ll talk about the (border) wall and hopefully some reduction in the size of the (federal) government and how to give some relief to working people,” the fourth-term GOP congressman said this week, adding that he was not concerned about Trump’s recent rhetoric, including calls to possibly use military force to take back the Panama Canal or bring Greenland under American control.

“I think foreign entities are saying, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do this,’ but then in the back of their mind, they’re thinking, ‘This guy’s a cowboy. He could pull something like that off,’” Burchett said. “And that puts a little fear into them. I think that’s a good thing.”

Watch out for the hammer

One professor who closely studies the presidency said she doubts the country will hear a newly sworn-in president trying to inspire them.

“I cannot imagine this will be George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” speech, or as inspirational as the inauguration speeches of John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln or (Franklin D. Roosevelt),” said Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “They tried to focus on the positive and what they saw as the hopeful aspects of America.”

“But I’m having trouble imagining Trump going positive,” she said.

Oddsmakers at the sports betting news site Action Network predicted the chances of Trump mentioning “unity” on Monday were 66.7 percent, but they put the odds of him saying “America first,” a popular rallying cry for his MAGA movement, at 83.3%.

“Maybe we’ll hear that the next four years are a continuation in the effort to make America great again, and Trump will say they are going to continue what we were doing, but we had a pause” while Biden was in office, Perry said.

“I just can’t imagine there won’t be some hammer that falls on Democrats and the Biden administration. The question is whether Trump will name names,” Perry added. “It’ll be a speech heavy on his main issues of rolling back regulation, cutting taxes, making us safe from open borders and securing cities that are run by Democrats.”

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College in North Carolina, pointed out in an email that Biden used part of his farewell address Wednesday night to highlight a “continued sense of American optimism and its ideals and values.”

That upbeat part of Biden’s speech may stand “as a contrast to what we could see in Trump’s inaugural address,” Bitzer predicted.

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