It may seem euphemistic to describe President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address as “uncompromising.” It will have struck many as merely crude and characteristically unpleasant.
Hard-hitting, it certainly was. Trump portrayed the past four years as marked by “horrible betrayal,” “viscous weaponization,” and a “corrupt establishment.”
But it is simplistic to think the moment at which he was speaking called for the sort of sunny rhetorical heights hit by John F. Kennedy telling the young nation, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
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America is radically different now, more troubled. It is not united by a shared culture, and Trump would have sounded phony, calling on everyone to put their shoulders to the wheel
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