When Donald Trump delivers his second inaugural address on Jan. 20, he will be continuing a tradition started in 1789 by George Washington. A lot has changed since the first president gave his speech to about 100 dignitaries in an office in Federal Hall in New York City.
James Monroe gave the first outdoor inaugural address in 1817. Ronald Reagan was the first to give the address from its current location on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. Washington’s reluctant remarks to a handful of people has become a long weekend of parties and balls, limos and rented tuxedos.
The inaugural address, like the State of the Union speech, is a tradition rather than a legal requirement. The oath of office makes someone president; the speech makes them presidential. As such, it falls into a category of address that Aristotle called epideictic. Such speeches are ceremonial, like wedding toasts or eulogies. As the rhetorical scholars Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson wrote in “Presidents Creating the Presidency,” inaugural addresses “link past and future in present contemplation, affirm or praise the shared principles that will guide the incoming administration, ask the audience to ‘gaze upon’ traditional values…”
In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson declared, “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
John Adams, who Jefferson defeated, was so bitter he lost that he skipped the inauguration.
In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln called on “the better angels of our nature,” and in his second famously encouraged, “With malice toward none, with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds … .”
John F. Kennedy told Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Not all speeches are as grand.
In 1841, President William Henry Harrison delivered an 8,500 word speech in lousy weather. He died of pneumonia a month later. Eight years ago, Donald Trump talked about “American carnage.”
Four years ago, Joe Biden called on Americans to “celebrate … the cause of democracy.” Like Adams, Trump opted to skip the speech given by the person who defeated him.
All of these speeches — the grand, the droning and the in between — spoke to a vision of what America is and could be.
Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of epideictic rhetoric, inaugural addresses are, or should be, ceremonial speeches by American presidents in praise of American ideals. To my mind, the speech puts “the American experience of self-government in light of higher truths and through reference to a shared heritage of beliefs, stories, ideas, symbols and events.”
That’s how John Carlson, the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, defines civil religion.
Popularized by Robert Bellah in 1967, civil religion is a way of conceiving who we are, where we came from and how we should behave next. Our civil religion is a way for a relatively young, very large country with more than 340 million people from every corner of the world, people who came here for a range of reasons or who were brought here against their will, to find common purpose. Civil religion puts our challenges in a context bigger than any one person or event.
Scholars often point to two strains of civil religion: humble and prophetic on one hand, and imperialistic on the other. A prophetic civil religion, to paraphrase Lincoln, prays not that God is on our side, but that we are on his. This humble civil religion keeps us working toward the “more perfect union” promised in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, a sacred document in the civil religious tradition.
An imperialistic civil religion, on the other hand, says that, as America, we are right because we are America. America is its own premise and conclusion. Such a view runs counter to America’s founding ideals, even if it reflects much of America’s historical reality.
Next Monday, Trump will stand on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol and share his American vision. In that epideictic moment, he can praise American ideals of hard work, humility, honor and respect. He can affirm that our union is always working toward becoming “more perfect,” as our founders did. Or he can declare that by definition America is always right and always righteous. He can choose pride over humility and proclaim that our path is just, no matter what path that is, because every path that America walks is just.
As someone who has spent a lifetime working in politics and who now teaches politics to the nation’s next generation of leaders, I hope he chooses the former. I hope that he reminds Americans that our nation is always in the making, and that in the words of the great American poet Langston Hughes, America “never has been yet — And yet must be.”
I’m skeptical, but as an American I am always optimistic.
Peter Loge is the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and the director of GWU’s Project on Ethics in Political Communication. He has spent more than three decades working in politics and is the editor of the book “Political Communication Ethics: Theory and Practice.” On Bluesky, he’s @ploge and @policommethics.
