Donald John Trump telegraphed the message on Jan. 20, 2017 during his astonishing inaugural speech to a nation that waited to hear what kind of president he would become.
The only memorable line from that speech came when he declared that “the American carnage ends right here, right now.”
Well, it didn’t end. However, it did signal an element of rage that Trump has used to foment throughout many Americans’ hearts. He spoke like an angry man, never mind that he had pulled off one of the great American political upsets in U.S. history.
The Republican Party that nominated Trump in 2016, and again in 2020 — and is possibly going to do so in 2024 — is now the party of rage. It feeds on some Americans’ anger at … well, you name it.
At the federal government, at “woke policy,” at immigrants, at Black people, at gay people, at the media, at local elections officials, at medical experts who mandated vaccines against a killer virus … for God’s sake!
I am thinking at this moment of President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign theme, that “morning in America” had dawned over the country. The president parlayed that warm-and-fuzzy feeling into a 49-state landslide over his opponent that year, Walter Mondale.
Morning in America has become a thing of the increasingly distant past, if you listen — and heed — the rhetoric coming from the MAGA morons who now run the Republican Party.
I won’t suggest that a new morning has dawned over the United States. We still have plenty of issues and problems with which the current president, Joe Biden, is trying to deal.
However, this should be a nation far removed from the rage that dominated the four-year term of his immediate predecessor. Therein lies — except for the obvious criminality for which he soon will stand trial — Donald John Trump’s lasting legacy.
