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By Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
“American Carnage” was gone. No prayer at Donald Trump’s inaugural moment distilled his rope like those terrifying words from his first.
But the recriminations they gave them? The representation of the United States as a dystopia with desperate for the rapid rescue?
And joined through a recently pronounced messianic sequence. The 47th President of the United States, which is also our 45th President, told us that he was not only in a search to align this country with his vision and vision of the Maga Movement. It is in a divinely directed mission.
Recalling the day in Butler, Pa., in July when “an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” Trump said that “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
That’s the keeper this time around — Trump’s trademark narcissism and usual grandiosity, along with an unsettling measure of theocracy, in one profoundly disturbing sentence. And it’s a signal of the sureness that he feels about all the executive orders that he then went on to promise, all the legislation that he foreshadowed and all the changes, from a militarized border to a war on wokeness, that he vowed.
While the safe portions of Trump’s speech, the promise of national prosperity, a commitment to “national unity,” revered culture and yielded to the Convention, the obscurity in which such scattered subtleties cannot simply go and do not go. For a giant part, it would not sow inspiration. It referred to an opinion and established scores.
He riffled through a seemingly endless litany of complaints about the screw-ups of Democrats holding the reins of government before today. Cleanup efforts in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, attempts to contain the wildfires in Pacific Palisades, inflation, initiatives related to race and gender, regulations regarding fossil fuels — America under rulers other than him could apparently get nothing right. But he’d fix it all. And seize control of the Panama Canal along the way!
Its strangely moderate opposite to a colossal ridiculous program and an even more colossal sense of itself. It is said that our maximum unique characteristics intensify as we age, and Trump is that Maxim has turned the president (still), his revenge and his viege to its maximum point.
In one of the other maximum memorable lines of his speech, he said: “In the beyond 8 years, they have tried and disputed me more than any president of our 250 years of history. ” It is a cristontitably reductive reading of American history. I wonder what God would say.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policies at the University of Duke, of the electronic book “The Era of the Complaint” and a contributing opinion writer. He wrote a weekly bulletin by email. Instagram threads @frankbruni • Faceebook
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