Trump’s 2025 inauguration speech will be very different from his infamous 2017 ‘American carnage’ address
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In 2025, MAGA has become even more extreme — but it’s also gotten smarter, writes Holly Baxter. Trump’s words back then painted a picture of a nation in crisis, one beset by poverty, crime, and the decay of its once-proud industrial base. He spoke of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones,” and an education system “flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.” His words conjured up visions of doe-eyed women and children trapped in a wasteland, crying out for a savior. It was a wartime speech made in peacetime, where the enemy is nebulous but the supposed destruction is immense.
![[Stand-ins rehearse the second inauguration of Donald Trump ahead of January 20th]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/13/02/Trump_Inauguration_Rehearsal_65766.jpg)
“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared,” he said. Working-class voters who had been left behind by the economic shifts of globalization felt that they were finally being recognized after years of being told to celebrate the technological advances that shut down factories and took away their jobs. Conservative politicos imagined NATO and other international treaties that they believed had effectively cuckolded the United States on the world stage. The older generation, who remembered the near past in which America effectively ruled the world, nodded along as the 45th president added: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”.
Importantly, this wasn’t just selling a message of anger at a declining America. It was selling the politics of envy: Someone else is now living our dream. And it was at its heart a hyper-capitalist message, implying as it did that America should’ve stayed on top and everyone else should’ve stayed at the bottom. Other politicians in other countries could have recast wealth redistribution across the world as a positive thing; an aspiration, even. For Trump, it was the root of all America’s problems — and only by reversing it, and ensuring someone else went to the bottom of the pile, would things be better again for all true and loyal Americans.
