I do not know why Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was selected to deliver a speech at the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. Presumably something tiresome about displaying unity during the peaceful transfer of power, Schumer being the top-ranking Democratic elected official left in Washington, and Schumer being marginally less likely to inflame the crowd’s rage than House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. (Update, Jan. 20, 6:51 p.m.: Schumer was speaking as the ranking Democrat on the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.)
Emphasis on the marginally. I was sitting maybe half a football field from the presidential dais. Not until Schumer spoke was there a visceral sense that, yes, indeed, there were some hundreds of thousands of Trump fans to my rear, murmuring anxiously. They had not come to see the Senate minority leader.
Schumer’s line that set off the murmurs began: “Whatever our race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity; whether we are immigrant or native-born …”
Few at this inauguration had come to hear about national respect for gender identity. It is one of those terms that, with a new regime in charge, they had expected never to hear again; they hoped that the time for lectures about respecting and welcoming immigrants into America’s traditions was over. The murmurs turned to boos and chants: “give us Trump,” “we want Trump.” Schumer kept reading.
He was the final Democrat to deliver a national address during the final minutes of Barack Obama’s presidency, and as Schumer gave way to Trump, the shift in control of the country could be felt all the way down in the interstices of the speech.
I went to far too many conservative conferences over the past eight years, and at every one, every time, there was always the same speech that always included roughly the same applause line: We need a president who’s not afraid to say the words “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Congratulations. “We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said. (In one of the speech’s Trumpiest flourishes, he declared that said terrorism would be eradicated “completely from the face of the Earth.” Insurance for everybody, terrorism for none.)
The use of “radical Islamic terror” got what sounded to me like the largest cheer of the day, perhaps even louder than the one that followed the conclusion of his oath (though not nearly as loud as the booms from the cannon salute.) The only other lines to earn a comparable response were the call to “protect our border from the ravages of other countries” and “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work.” None of the few conciliatory lines in the speech—like the tautly written, resonant-seeming, and mostly ahistorical maxim that “when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice”—received more than polite applause.
The liberals, and their nagging insistence on inclusivity and political correctness, lost. Donald Trump’s inauguration was the celebration of their demise. There was only one line in Schumer’s speech, near the end, that earned loud cheers: “I know that our best days are yet to come.” It was a cheeky cheer—get off the stage, Chuck, and let’s get a start on those best days—to the conclusion of a sentence that mentioned “Americans whose families have been here for generations and those who have just arrived.” That part may have been lost in the noise.
