Our 44th president made his mark with soaring language. How will Donald Trump make his?
image from
E.J. Dionne Jr., Joy-Ann Reid, Washington Post
Excerpt:
Obama appreciated the call in the Constitution’s Preamble to a “more perfect union,” as Bill Clinton did. In Obama’s world, “perfect” was as often a verb as it was an adjective describing some optimal state. The assumption is always that the United States has not yet reached its goal, but that it gets nearer to it by the decade. We perfect ourselves. ...
“Fifty years from Bloody Sunday, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer,” he declared on the 50th anniversary of the March in Selma, Ala. “Two hundred and thirty-nine years after this nation’s founding our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge.” ...
[Trump] has almost gleefully flouted the norms and conventions that have long characterized our politics, including the expectation of civility and the goal of unifying rather than dividing. ...
Trump showed how little interest he has in reaching out to his critics. He made it hard to imagine that he would use his inaugural address, as presidents traditionally have, to bring the country together. ...
However divided the country became under Obama, he always signaled that he saw himself as the president of all Americans. While Trump nodded to this idea on election night, it has not been his natural calling. The man who loves to talk about himself still needs to discover the power of the first word of our Constitution.
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