Donald Trump has one of the rarest things in American history, a second chance. When he takes the oath of office, he gets a do-over. Only once before has a president given a poorly received inaugural address, suffered through a rocky first term, lost reelection, and then, four years later, been returned to office to try again. For Trump, it begins shortly after noon on Monday when the echo of a 21-gun salute ebbs and he begins his second inaugural address.
History—including Trump’s personal history at his first inauguration—suggests it won’t be easy for the new president. There have been 57 inaugural addresses delivered by 40 presidents, beginning with George Washington’s first on April 30, 1789, at New York’s Federal Hall. But fewer than 10 are remembered at all today and even fewer are considered great.
Trump’s effort in 2017 is remembered, but not for the reasons he'd prefer. Widely panned at the time, it was notable for its dark and confrontational tone, a stark break from traditional efforts to use the speech to provide what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “an interlude of national reunion.” The Independent called it a “grey, America First brutality … that made everyone other than his hardcore supporters wince and worry.”
The speech did nothing to boost the new president’s popularity. In the two Gallup polls taken after the inauguration, his approval/disapproval stood at 45/49 and 43/52, making him the only modern president with approval under 50 percent immediately after his inauguration.
Trump needed just 74 words to cement his place in inaugural lore, sketching the darkest imaginable picture of America as an apocalyptic hellscape that only he could fix.
“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” he said ominously before declaring, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Wildly out of step with inaugural traditions, that rhetoric provided a reminder that no American political speech is more challenging. Generations of presidential speechwriters have begun their task by reading all the inaugural addresses that came before. All have likely reached the same conclusion reached by Ken Khachigian, who wrote President Reagan’s 1981 address.
“You read Lincoln’s, and you ask, 'How can I even begin to put pen to paper?' It made it very daunting to even try to do anything,” Khachigian said. “There’s a gradation in speechwriting, and I put inaugural addresses as the most difficult to write.”
Jon Favreau, who penned President Obama’s 2013 address, called it “one of the hardest speeches I’ve written” because of the stakes and the burdens of history. Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter for President Clinton as well as an author and founder of West Wing Writers, said writers “tend to seize up” when tackling this speech.
“You read the anthology, and it is quite clear that most presidents have been outmatched by the occasion,” Shesol said. One problem, he said, is that new presidents “have to find their presidential voice and they’ve only been president for a couple of minutes.”
Ted Widmer, a historian and also a former Clinton speechwriter, is critical of most inaugural addresses. “I’ve really studied these things because I made a specialty out of it, and even I can barely remember any of them. They’re spectacularly boring; they’re poorly written. They go into a kind of artificial language.”
Partly, that is because of the pressure to reach the oratorical heights of the greatest—Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865 and 1861, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1933, John F. Kennedy’s in 1961, and Thomas Jefferson’s in 1801. “You feel like you’ve got to rise to extraordinary levels of eloquence and oratory to match them,” Khachigian said. “And that’s a false god.”
Khachigian recalled that when he gave his draft to Reagan, the president-elect told him, “Ken, this was very eloquent. But I have to do it my way.”
“He tamped down the high-flown language,” Khachigian said.
The lesson, agreed on by all speechwriters, is that the speech has to be authentic. Shesol said too many presidents study John F. Kennedy’s moving address in 1961 and try to speak in Kennedy’s voice with Kennedy inflections. He cited George W. Bush as one who struggled to find the right voice. Bush's first inaugural was “quite beautifully written and well-constructed,” Shesol said. “It just didn’t sound a damn thing like either the George W. Bush of the campaign or the voice of the president as it developed over the course of the next year.”
Ever since Jefferson in 1801, a top goal of most presidents has been to use the speech to try to bind the nation together. With memories of the bitter 1800 election fresh and an awareness that this was the first time the presidency had shifted from one party to another, Jefferson famously proclaimed, “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.”
That is not the tack Trump took in 2017. “The language of American carnage is the antithesis of, ‘We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists,'” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. “It was revolutionary for Jefferson to use that language. Now it is what we expect. So when there was such a clear divergence from that, it was shocking.”
Now, it may be shocking if Trump pivots to more healing language.
“It was a shocking act to deliver as gleefully divisive an inaugural address as that,” Shesol said. “I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t do it again this time.” Khachigian says Trump has to be himself. “This is not an easy speech to write, but I think the worst thing for him is to be something other than what he represented in the campaign,” he said. “If he sounds something other than Donald Trump, it would be weird. If he looks weak and pusillanimous in his speech, that just doesn’t work.”
But Widmer sees benefits to a more conciliatory approach. “If he brings us back together, I think he would do himself a big favor,” he said. “A lot of people actually want to be brought back together, and he could surprise us.” It is, he said, a second chance to show he has learned something since the darkness of his first inauguration.
Second chances don’t always work out. Grover Cleveland, the only other president with non-consecutive terms, showed that when he returned to office in 1893 after being defeated for reelection four years earlier. He had given an inaugural address in his first term that was eminently forgettable in every way except one—he was the only president ever to bring no notes with him, giving the entire speech from memory. Given a second chance in 1893, Cleveland gave another dreadful speech—but with a twist. He became the only president to use the address to downplay America’s strengths, warning of “the exaggerated confidence in our country’s greatness.”
With his “make America great again” mantra, Trump is unlikely to echo that sentiment. But it is unclear if he will be able to take advantage of his second chance any better than Cleveland did 132 years ago.