“Over the past eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250 year history,” said Donald Trump in his second inaugural address. “And I’ve learned a lot along the way.”
This section of his speech, yesterday, is probably the best.
Because true.
While known for hyperbolic statements, extravagant figures of speech and whoppers and colorful b.s., Donald John Trump’s not exaggerating to claim a special status of having endured more than other presidents and presidential candidates. The prosecutions, the impeachments, the lies, the elaborate psychological operations carried on by mass media and Deep State operatives, and more, give weight to his claim.
Now, this doesn’t make any of his proposals and positions and other opinions correct.
But it does help us receive his next sentence: “The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one, that I can tell you.” In the second half of the speech Trump framed his approach as a nationalism in the McKinley-Roosevelt tradition. Theirs is the kind of politics and republic he seeks to revive.
Also not untrue? “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom, and, indeed, to take my life.”
The mobbing of multiple prosecutions was piled onto by two would-be assassins. Their story, Tucker Carlson noted last week — has dropped out of the conversation.
Trump dropped it back in: “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear — but 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.”
Whatever else you may say about Trump, and whatever credence you give to his theological spin on the shots fired on July 13, 2024, his take is, if a stretch, a traditional one; many who first witnessed the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, leapt to a simple conclusion: he would become president again.
And he did.
No joke — as another, very different president liked to say.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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