When it comes to speeches, there are two Donald Trumps. The first is Teleprompter Trump, who reads a prepared speech and tends to be staid, sleepy, and insincere. The second is Rally Trump, who riffs in front of a cheering crowd and is wild, aggressive, and more true to the person that Trump really is.
We saw this duality on display immediately after Trump’s inauguration.
In his official inaugural address in the Capitol Rotunda, Teleprompter Trump delivered a largely unmemorable performance — a sleepy address that gave audiences little substance to remember it by. In an impromptu follow-up performance given to the overflow crowd in nearby Emancipation Hall, Rally Trump made an appearance — giving a rambling but undeniably more energetic monologue that Trump himself described as “a better speech than the one I made upstairs.”
Rally Trump’s speech was a much better guide to what actually animates Trump than the more buttoned-down teleprompter address. And the portrait the second address painted is of a man who remains convinced of his own fictions and obsessed with revenge against those who challenged them.
The Rally Trump speech really got going when Trump began talking about things he left out of the official inaugural address. He singles out prospective pardons for January 6, 2021, Capitol rioters as an important example, saying it’s “action not words that count — and you’re gonna see a lot of action on the J6 hostages.”
You can see how deeply Trump cares about transforming the official history of January 6. It’s not good enough that he is returning to office: He needs to rewrite what happened such that the people who rioted to try and steal the 2020 election for him are the victims — “hostages” — rather than criminals. It’s all in service of the grander goal of insisting that Trump cannot lose and never has, and using his new powers to try and force reality to match.
Similar thinking was at work in Trump’s next riff on outgoing President Joe Biden’s “preemptive pardons” for potential Trump prosecution targets like Gen. Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, and Biden’s own family members.
Trump insisted these people were “very, very guilty of very, very bad crimes,” accusing the January 6 committee — which he referred to as “the unselect committee of political thugs” — of “deleting all the information on Nancy Pelosi” (it’s unclear what criminal statute this would fall under). It’s clear that Trump really does want to go after these people as part of his campaign to rewrite the events of the 2020 election; the extent to which he’s stymied by Biden’s pardons remains an open question.
Over the course of the next half hour, Trump continued down his revisionist lane.
Trump implied that Cheney opposed him not because of any perceived threat to democracy but because her dad was a war profiteer. He spent a while disputing a specific piece of January 6 testimony — that he attempted to seize the wheel of the presidential limousine to drive to the Capitol. He explicitly restated that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, and then insisted that “we would have won the state of California” in 2024 if it weren’t for illegal votes.
The point is not that any of this is new ground for Trump. Rather, it’s that none of it is.
In his first truly authentic speech after returning to office, where he felt unchained to discuss what he really cared about, he spent the bulk of the time obsessing over election results and January 6, endlessly litigating the past and (at times openly) stating his desire to seek recompense and revenge for the indignity of losing an election.
The Rally Trump speech was the truest reflection of the once-and-current president’s feelings and, I suspect, his governing priorities. And four years of a president who uses his power to punish political enemies and reward his lawbreaking friends does not augur well for American democracy.
