Anyone who thought the grievance-wielding, enemy-targeting Donald Trump might have taken a day off after listening to his formal inaugural speech in the Capitol Rotunda yesterday, didn’t need to wait long to find out just how wrong they were.
That’s when the true Trump, the not “beautiful unifying” Trump, came out. He rattled off complaints about the House Jan. 6 Committee “of political thugs,” about Nancy Pelosi, about Joe Biden, about wrestling with a Secret Service agent over the presidential limo’s steering wheel when Trump wanted to drive to the Capitol on Jan. 6 as his mob invaded.
That’s the Trump many Americans fear. Nothing about Monday gave them any reason not to.
In that speech Trump never mentioned the words “economy” nor “jobs,” and in his second, informal, inaugural speech to the overflow crowd in the Capitol Visitor Center, it was clear why. Even worse, in that second speech, he displayed all the grudges that helped undue his first term.
It’s only been one day. Hopefully, for the sake of the country he now leads once again, he will pull back and focus on what the public wants, not on his enemies list.
“They all said inflation was the No. 1 issue. I said ‘I disagree.’ I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know. And I made it my No. 1.,” he told the crowd in this second speech.
He continued: “I talked about inflation too, but you know how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost? I’d say it and I’d hit it hard, but then I go back to the fact that we don’t want criminals coming into our country. We don’t want the jails of every country in the world virtually being deposited into the United States.”
Trump confessed that this is what he wanted to say in the main speech, but “between JD and Melania and anybody else that said, ‘Please, sir, it’s such a beautiful unifying speech. Please, sir, don’t say these things.’ ”
“She said ‘it’s such a beautiful, such a beautiful speech. You can’t put things in there that you’re going to put in,’ and was going to talk about the J6 hostages. But you’ll be happy, because you know it’s action, not words, that count. And you’re going to see a lot of action on the J6 hostages.”
So he waited a half an hour for the second round, when the real Trump spoke, which included his litany about Jan. 6, Pelosi and Biden. And he yammered on and on about the different types of fencing at the southern border.
And, being Trump, he carped that he was cheated of votes, without any evidence. Focusing on voter ID he said he would have won the state of California last fall. In truth, he lost the Golden State by more than 3 million votes in 2024. He lost by more than 7 million in 2020 and more than four million in 2016. But addressing House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump: “I think when we get things cleaned up and we get back to a little bit of normalcy, I’m going to ask the speaker to really get involved because I think we would have won the state of California.”
Good grief. The president summed up, saying “I think this was a better speech than the one I made upstairs, OK. I think this was better.” Of course he thought so.
