On 22nd October, 2016, Donald Trump, then a mere candidate to be the president of the United States, went to the civil war cemetery at Gettysburg to speak. The Gettysburg Address is not just Abraham Lincoln’s timeless paean to the virtues of American democracy. It is a presidential tradition. Every American president after Lincoln has spoken at Gettysburg and their speeches are all essentially one. They go to praise America and urge it forward. And they are usually pithy; Lincoln himself needed no more than 272 words. Trump spoke for 40 minutes and he delivered a tirade in which he alleged the political establishment, embodied by “the Clinton Machine” was corrupt and sought to enrich itself at the expense of the people. It was time to stop the raiding of America. It was time for We, the People, he said, to strike back.
All of which goes to show that unity is not Donald Trump’s natural idiom. Yet, in yesterday’s speech to the Republican National Convention, in which he accepted the nomination to be president, Trump tried to bring the nation together. Enrolling himself among their number, he even referred to the “American patriots” who “stared down death to keep alive the flame of freedom” at Yorktown, Gettysburg and Medway. “Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences and disagreements, and go forward united, as one people, and one nation,” he added. “The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart”.
These are lines Barack Obama could have delivered and, coming as they did, after the opening in which Trump spoke of the attempt of his life, the tone in the hall was respectful and sombre. This was not yet a triumphalist meeting or a rally. Trump thanked the providential intervention of the almighty for his survival. As the speech dragged on and on for an hour and a half, to become the longest acceptance speech in American history, large sections of the crowd could stand no more and sat down. At times their cheering seemed to be willing their beloved candidate to finish. It was all rather conventional but not Republican National Conventional.
And yet, for all the difference in rhetorical approach and in the mood of the crowd, in the end Donald Trump was unable to reinvent himself. In a sense, he would be unwise to do so. The art of rhetoric has three parts—argument, emotion and character. The emotion was supplied by the context of the assassination attempt. But Trump’s character comes from his persona as the tribune of the people and he cannot help but be himself. So he was here, frequently veering off the scripted text on the autocue. It may well be that the speech as written was more of a corrective to his Gettysburg abomination than the speech as delivered. But once at the podium, Trump gave a rapid, although muted, run through his signature tunes.
He described America as a nation in decline. He promised to build an iron dome missile defence system over America (a wall in the sky), to end every international crisis. He promised lower inflation, an end illegal immigration and called Washington DC “a killing field”. He said, rather out of the blue, that Hannibal Lecter would love to have you for dinner. He wandered without direction through Covid, new advanced drugs and Space Force. The old Trump was still there. The message of unity will be in the headlines, but read the small print. Or, rather, the bits that were not printed at all.
Apart from the Gettysburg memorial there is another storied speech in the American political calendar whose theme is usually unity. That is the inaugural address. It is traditional for the new president in January to seek to dissolve the divisions revealed in November. The standard presidential inaugural is a speech about healing. From Jefferson to Obama, both of whom have used the following locution, it has been a speech on which the president declares there are no blue states or red states, just the United States. In 2020, Donald Trump was the first president to embrace the opposite. Instead of seeking to heal, Trump made an aggressively political stump speech. He hit all the discordant notes that had got him though the campaign. It was ugly and it was a portent of what was to come. Last night Trump included a line that ought to have been in that inaugural: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America.”
It is hard to imagine that he can live up to that. It is both his virtue and his vice as a speaker and as a leader that Donald Trump cannot help being himself. The planned message was one in which a healing president heals the nation in turn. But it is a fond hope that this softer tone will in any way be an omen of a kinder, gentler presidency.
