NEW YORK (news agencies) — He talked of a new Manifest Destiny and a “Golden Age.” He invoked the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. An honor guard appeared with tricorn hats, fifes and drums — all traditional Revolutionary War iconography. Those in attendance heard tunes deployed from the classic American songbook — from Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
At the inauguration Monday, American history in its varied stripes was firmly planted. “We will not forget our country,” President Donald Trump said.
In summoning people to his vision for the future throughout a day of pageantry, Trump assembled a dizzying collage of American myths, tropes and ideals. His new “Golden Age” was brimming with the stories that shaped the nation’s past. But how will he use them?
A presidential inaugural address is typically a projection of the balance between American yesterdays and American tomorrows. Trump came to power the first time, and regained it the second, with an exhortation to reclaim the past and “Make America Great Again.” In his address on Monday, he conflated a vast and sometimes confusing array of national imagery from across the centuries to make his larger point.
Most epic, perhaps, was the notion of American expansionism once called “Manifest Destiny” — a romantic story about the “God-given” right to push westward and outward that has defined the nation’s growth even while oppressing and killing many others as it has played out over 350 years.
This, coupled with his recent comments about absorbing Greenland, making Canada the 51st state and taking over the Panama Canal, suggests Trump and his administration consider expansionism to be not a sliver of history but a matter for here and now. Consider Trump’s sweeping statement:
“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls. Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close. Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted millions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”
Manifest Destiny was itself fueled by the equally foundational notion of American exceptionalism — colonial Gov. John Winthrop’s 17th-century statement of being “as a shining city upon a hill” as an example to others. That was one of the few dominant threads of American history Trump didn’t invoke on Monday, possibly because Ronald Reagan resurrected it so famously in his 1989 farewell address. Its echoes, though, were everywhere in Trump’s words.
The notion of American exceptionalism is itself a freighted topic. For some, it is triumphal and natural — the United States is the greatest nation on Earth and must act that way. For others, it is a statement of eternal potential and example-setting that does not necessarily place Americans above others.
Trump leaned hard into the former definition. “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world,” he said.
“We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars,” Trump said. One news outlet declared in response: “MAGAfest Destiny.”
That kind of language has never rolled easily off Trump’s tongue. He tends to favor more blunt, even brutish rhetoric to make a point. The overall effect was an exercise in looking over the national shoulder even as he talked about moving toward new horizons. Simply by saying that the nation’s “Golden Age” had just begun — a seemingly forward-looking statement — Trump was employing terminology that hints at the past.
Some of the American cultural mashups that popped up were a bit puzzling — like the 1980s Guns N’ Roses hit “Sweet Child of Mine” echoing across a packed Capital One Arena as the jumbotron showed billionaire Jeff Bezos, in sunglasses, striding in. Or Elon Musk entering — with his already highly questioned gestures — to the tune of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Even the strains of Scott Joplin’s ragtime — a key marker in American racial and musical history — seemed designed to make a larger point, though maybe a song is just a song.
Or maybe it’s more. The use of “This Land Is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie — a song composed as a rejoinder to the saccharine patriotism of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” — was a curious choice. After all, it came from the mind of a man who railed against injustice and famously wrote upon his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” There’s enough American history there for both sides to claim.
For all the focus on what came before, Trump’s immediate acts after the inaugural were not reactionary but — in their 21st-century context, at least — quite radical. His flurry of executive orders, executed as promised, included pardons for about 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, the renaming of Denali to McKinley and — perhaps most saliently — sweeping restrictions on immigration that evoked 19th-century and early 20th-century exclusion rules.
When Trump summoned so much of the American past — including parts of it that are still hotly contested, not least by those whose ancestors suffered through them — he assembled it into a tapestry of what he called “liberation” (itself an often radical term) that led to this conclusion that seemed decided at odds with public sentiment: “National unity is now returning to America and confidence and pride is soaring like never before.”
“That’s what I want to be — a peacemaker and a unifier,” Trump said. One question, though, hangs in the air, as it often does at a hinge point like this one. It’s a question that he must address, but even more so it’s something to consider as his second administration begins with the statement that he has the winds of history at his back:
Of the American past, what is worthy of carrying into the American future?
That’s the risk of history, and its reward, too: It can be disassembled, recombined, reinterpreted at will. The most fascinating aspect of Trump’s inaugural was, perhaps, how so many of the currents of American history — from the Monroe Doctrine to the Pax Americana — are still alive, still potent, still being used by countless constituencies and stakeholders to tell the stories that they wish to tell. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.”
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for media, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him at or
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