I’ve never made bones about the fact I’ve been a Trump skeptic.  Eight years ago I voted for Scott Walker, and thought that Trump’s term would be a disaster, hopefully mitigated by a good SCOTUS pick.   I was wrong – mostlly, anyway.  His behavior in 2020 cost the GOP the Senate, and he had an uncanny habit of endorsing bad candidates.  But I held my nose and voted for him.

There was no holding my nose this time – although I make no bones about the fact that I’d really like to see more of the Focused Donald than the Twitter Donald. 

Yesterday was a good start.

Itwas the first inauguration I watched live since Jimmy Carter.  But I picked a good one.

Trump’s speech was the best I’ve seen him give. 

It clocked in at 29 minutes – and didn’t include (many of) the rhetorical tangents that make so many of this speeches feel like rhetorical slalom runs. 

It was by turns pugnacious and intensely optimistic.   I was glad I had a chance to see it.  I think it recapped the tone of his campaign – especially since the first assassination attempt – and laid out the agenda far more clearly than he ever did in his first time.  It was…bracing. 

Side issue – my father, a speech teacher, used to say that nobody in the modern world embodied classical oratory like Southern Baptist ministers.

Rev. Lorenzo Sprewell certainly made the case:

It was a genuine wonder and joy to behold. 

And as someone who grew up seeing “dead air” as the enemy, and believes taped backing tracks are a plague on society, Carrie Underwood did one of the most amazing things a performer can do – took a compete technical clusterf**k and. turned it into a triumph:

Let the metaphors fly. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, January 21st, 2025 at 6:32 am and is filed under Campaign '24, History And Its Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.