TRUMP'S INAUGURATION SPEECH VS. REALITY

- NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. 

It’s been one year since President Trump promised to bring an end to the “American carnage” he described in his apocalyptic inauguration speech. Here’s a look back at Trump’s words and where we are now.

BY DENIS SLATTERY

Trump’s first year in the White House has seen victories for the populist President: a massive tax overhaul, the appointment of a young conservative jurist to the Supreme Court, the withdrawal from an international climate accord and a somewhat steady economy.

But there have been hiccups. Trump's efforts to repeal Obamacare crashed and burned in Congress, Americans feel more divided than at any other time in recent memory, no infrastructure plan has been revealed and Trump has the lowest approval rating of any President in their first year since 1945.

Below is an annotated transcript of Trump’s inaugural address.

Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans, and people of the world: thank you.

We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people.

Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come. We will face challenges. We will confront hardships. But we will get the job done.

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent.

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

Despite Trump’s populist message, he has assembled a cabinet of career conservatives that historians say is the richest in U.S. history. He has also embraced the mainline Republicans in order to pass a tax plan that benefits the elite. And, as many pointed out, he sounded a lot like a Batman villain:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Trump’s record during his first year was spotty, but his victories align with mainstream Republicans regarding tax cuts, pro-business policies, curbs on environmental and safety regulations, immigration and healthcare.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

According to a report from the Tax Policy Center, half of all American taxpayers will be paying more in 10 years under the Trump’s tax plan than they are now.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

New jobs numbers released earlier this month showed the country added 2 million jobs in 2017 -- another robust year of growth and a reason for Trump to tout the strong economy, but the rate of job growth is down slightly from the last several years.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

The Trump administration has rescinded several regulations meant to protect workers, average Americans and the environment. Trump has introduced rules to rollback offshore drilling regulations put in place following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 people and caused the worst oil spill in American history and overturned the so-called net neutrality regulations that treated internet service providers like public utilities.

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.

That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.

It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

Trump triumphantly mocked previous administrations as former President Carter, President Clinton, President George W. Bush and President Obama stood behind him. Bush, not known for his elocution, gave a grave assessment of the speech. “That was some weird s--t,” he reportedly told several people.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

The cornerstone of Trump’s populist message rings hollow one year on as Trump’s Twitter habit, his crass language and his defense of white nationalists have all led to deeper divisions among Americans. Trump’s base, including the alt-right, embraced and defended the President’s recent vulgar rhetoric on African nations. Fox News host Jesse Watters noted that “this is how the forgotten men and women in America talk at the bar.”

.@JesseBWatters on @POTUS' 's---hole' remarks "This doesn't move the needle at all. This is who Trump is. He doesn't care. He shoots from the hip. And if he offends some people, fine. There's so many more offensive things that are happening in this world." https://t.co/Z8lagBViYepic.twitter.com/syst3qtlls

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 11, 2018

Everyone is listening to you now.

You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: 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 gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

Trump's grim portrait of an apocalyptic American landscape bears little resemblance to reality. Overall, crime is half what it was in the early 1990s. Homicides are less than half of what they were in the 1980s and 90s, according to factcheck.org.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

The phrase “American carnage,” the dark heart of Trump's inauguration speech, was relentlessly mocked for its dark and despondent view of the state of the country.

BREAKING: Mark Burnett announces new reality TV show called “American Carnage”

— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) January 20, 2017

This American Carnage was Ira Glass' original title.

— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) January 20, 2017

American Carnage sounds like a slasher movie that got 30% on Rotten Tomatoes

— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) January 20, 2017

We are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.

According to a recent YouGov/CBS News poll, three in four Americans believe that the country is divided.

A new study by the Pew Research Center found that partisan divisions are now much more important than religious or educational ones in driving political views.

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;

Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;

We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own;

Trump’s much ballyhooed border wall has yet to be built. The President is petitioning Congress to supply funds for the partition despite campaign promises that Mexico would pay for it.

And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

American infrastructure remains neglected and underfunded and Trump has yet to roll out his highly-anticipated plan. The White House’s failed “infrastructure week” in June was a disaster of public relations as no details, budgets or blueprints were unveiled. Instead, the initiative was overshadowed by Trump’s tweets about his travel ban and fired FBI director James Comey’s Capitol Hill testimony.

We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.

One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.

Despite the narrative of lost jobs, some measures show that the manufacturing industry is thriving in the U.S. What's known as the industry's ‘total real output,’ the value of all the goods it produces, has been hovering near an all-time high for three years.

The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

The GOP tax plan, Trump’s singular legislative accomplishment, will knock most middle class families right in the wallet within a decade. Despite short-term savings, around 50% of taxpayers will see a tax hike by 2027, according to The Tax Policy Center.

But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.

From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.

The phrase "America First" has a dark history, first being associated with an anti-Semitic group that counted Charles Lindbergh and future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart as members and also as a campaign slogan for Pat Buchanan. Buchanan’s 2000 presidential bid as a Reform candidate was mocked by Trump. He called the perennial candidate a “Hitler lover.”

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.

We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.

I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.

The White House is planning a late January roll out of the President's infrastructure plan leading up to his first State of the Union address on Jan. 30.

We will get our people off of welfare and back to work – rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.

Trump is reportedly preparing a complete review of federal social welfare programs including food stamps, Medicaid and housing benefits. Kentucky, one of the poorest states in the country, became the first state to get federal approval to impose work requirements in the Medicaid program last week. Eight other states have pending waiver requests for similar conditions.

Six in ten Medicaid adults are already working, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Republicans and the Trump administration want to cut so-called entitlement programs to help cover the cost of their massive tax program. But they could face a backlash at the polls in November.

We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and Hire American.

Just a reminder, most Trump Organization products are made overseas.

We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world – but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.

Trump's first year of foreign policy has been a doozy. He has traded threats with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un on Twitter and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. He exchanged aggressive handshakes with world leaders and called for warmer relations with Russia, even casually telling a Kremlin representative that “great pressure” was relieved after he fired “nutjob” FBI director James Comey.

We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.

The leader of the American Foreign Service Association said in November the Trump administration is crippling U.S. diplomacy through reductions to senior positions across the State Department.

We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.

Despite essentially continuing the strategy set forth under Obama, Trump has taken credit for the fact that ISIS is in retreat.

“I totally changed rules of engagement. I totally changed our military, I totally changed the attitudes of the military and they have done a fantastic job,” Trump said on “The Chris Plante Show” in October.

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

The President’s own prejudices have repeatedly gotten him into hot water, despite his claims that he is the “least racist person.”

Trump reportedly told lawmakers working on an immigration deal that he didn’t understand why the U.S. would take so many people from “shithole” countries in Africa over places like Norway.

In August, after a violent white nationalist rally left a counter-protester dead, Trump blamed “both sides” for the conflict and added that there were “very fine people” among those marching alongside neo-Nazis.

The Bible tells us, “how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.”

We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity.

When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.

There should be no fear – we are protected, and we will always be protected.

We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement and, most importantly, we are protected by God.

Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving.

We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action – constantly complaining but never doing anything about it.

President trump boasted at the end of 2017 that his administration “signed more legislation than anybody.”

According to govtrack.us, Trump ranks last in legislation signed among post-World War II Presidents in their first calendar year.

The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.

Do not let anyone tell you it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America.

We will not fail. Our country will thrive and prosper again.

We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow.

A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights, and heal our divisions.

It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag.

Trump's over-the-top response to NFL players who kneeled in protest during the national anthem peaked during a fiery Alabama speech in which he encouraged owners to "get that son of a b---h off the field right now."

The President spent months deriding the protests, meant to bring awareness to police treatment of African American men and racial injustice, as disrespectful to the flag and anthem.

And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.

So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words:

You will never be ignored again.

Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.

Together, we will make America strong again.

We will make America wealthy again.

We will make America proud again.

We will make America safe again.

And, yes, together, we will make America great again. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.