Russell Riley is an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, where he co-chairs the Presidential Oral History Program.
During the course of the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump was a wrecking ball. He not only toppled a long line of experienced challengers for the White House, he knocked down columns of time-tested political norms that had been erected throughout the country's history to channel political discourse and to sustain the health of Washington's governing institutions.
Fealty to party orthodoxies? No. Moderation in rhetoric? No. Openness about personal finances? No. Coalition building among defeated challengers? No. Wariness toward Russia? No. Commitment to the bipartisan consensus on American leadership in the world? No. Conciliation in victory? No.
Yet if we believe the public-opinion industry, Mr. Trump was elected not in spite of these tendencies, but precisely because of them. Each transgression against what had become customary of presidential candidates – including a hidden-microphone display of appalling sexism – merely confirmed the new President's strongest supporters in their hopes that he will wreak havoc on a political order they no longer trust.
The inaugural address Mr. Trump delivered as his first official act as President continued these norm-busting ways. Inaugurations are highly ceremonial expressions of the country's civic religion, and as such are most often used as moments of unification. The new president seeks out high-minded ways to remind Americans of what they have in common, largely to bind the wounds from an election campaign that always leaves lingering bitterness. Abraham Lincoln was the master of this genre. During his first inaugural, as the Civil War approached, he urged the divided nation to follow "the better angels of our nature." And during his second, in 1865, he implored his fellow Americans to act "With malice toward none, with charity for all."
Mr. Trump chose to follow a different course. Although the address was constructed using the elevated rhetorical flourishes typical of inaugurations, in language atypical of Mr. Trump – "whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams" – it was a speech of unusual darkness.
The America he described was a bleak landscape, a place of dystopian "carnage": "Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential." Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill" is nowhere to be seen here.
But the President didn't stop there. He openly pointed a finger of blame for these accumulated maladies: Washington. "For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs, and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land."
This is, to say the least, not conventional fare for an inaugural address. We can only imagine at this point what the reaction was among the congressional leaders seated behind him on the stage. Perhaps they will assume that the President's indictment is of the other party – and they may well be right.
Although Mr. Trump bowed in the direction of bipartisanship early in the speech, near the end he took what appeared to be another swipe at Congressman John Lewis, using virtually the same language he tweeted out earlier after Mr. Lewis had questioned his political legitimacy: "We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action constantly complaining but never doing anything about it." A text delivered with his usual tone of defiance in expression and body language did not seem to invite a bipartisan interpretation.
But given the fact that party affiliations are among the most enduring and revered of Washington's orthodoxies, there remains at least the possibility that they, too, will ultimately come up against an unorthodox President's wrecking ball.
If so, Mr. Trump's partisans should consider themselves forewarned. A President armed with the conviction that his election represents a return to power of the American people is unlikely to brook dissent easily.