USA - If his first inaugural address was menacing, delivered with a clenched fist – a series of threats to all those disruptors of the ideal American way of life – this one was messianic. All the promised measures were there – the immediate removal of illegal migrants being the most widely anticipated – but they were embedded in a larger theme, which was his personal mission which, he made clear, had been entrusted to him by God.
The tone this time was more controlled, more calibrated to suit the solemnity of the occasion. If the previous presidency had been chaotic, this one was going to be thoroughly under his control and its objectives would not be up for argument.
He would usher in, rather paradoxically, both an era of common sense and one of radical reform. There would be a new glorious rebirth of America’s standing in the world, but this incarnation of the great patriotic dream would also remain true to the nation’s original spirit.
So the past and the future would be melded into a greatness never seen before: a country infused with a spiritual purpose which was both true to its origins and utterly different from anything it had ever attempted – and this transformation would be accomplished immediately. The “golden age of America begins right now”.