Politics

Why Trump supporters see sunshine in Trump’s dark and foreboding speeches

Published

2 years ago

January 20, 2025

The first time Donald Trump gave an inaugural address, official Washington winced.

It was a scorching and dystopian assessment of what he cast as a country in ruins — this “American carnage,” Trump said. And it was, as George W. Bush reportedly called it, “some weird shit.”

But that’s not how much of Trump’s MAGA base remembers it. Like Trump, they, too, saw a hollowed-out nation in 2017. But what Trump’s supporters mostly recalled in the president-elect — and the repeat performance they are preparing for on Monday — is redemption.

Phillip Stephens, the Republican Party chair in Robeson County, North Carolina, which shifted sharply toward Trump in November, said that what he heard from Trump in 2017 was “a lot of hopeful stuff.” And James Dickey, a former chair of the Texas Republican Party, remembered “feeling positive.”

Fixing “the degradation that we all saw and were living through … that was all part of fulfilling the Make America Great Again promise,” he said.

For the base, Dickey said, it was “refreshing.”

And if Trump’s first inaugural address was lacking in the traditionally conciliatory rhetoric of victory, his loyalists weren’t missing it that year — or expecting him to change course.

“We can talk about unity, but you know, those that are against him just aren’t going to do it,” said Sally Kizer, an organizer of a tea party group in Arizona’s Yuma County. “He’s got so many things he wants to do.”

Trump is leaning on Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, who helped shape his speeches during the campaign, to craft his inaugural address, according to two people familiar with the process and granted anonymity to describe preparations. However other advisers, including immigration hawk Stephen Miller, will have a hand in it. The president-elect told NBC News on Saturday that the theme of the speech would be “unity and strength, and also the word ‘fairness.’”

It’s that last word that may be instructive. Trump said, “Because you have to be treating people fairly. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, everything’s going to be wonderful.’ You know, we went through hell for four years with these people. And so, you know, something has to be done about it.”

As for unity, that’s the kind of rhetoric his advisers suggested he would offer before his first inaugural eight years ago, too. And it’s hard to find anyone, Republican or Democrat, who expects him to follow through.

“Do I think it will on net be negative? Yeah,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan and former executive director of the state’s Republican Party, who was critical of Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election following his defeat that year. “I do think it will be, for Trump, more positive than normal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Trump speech that I came away from saying, ‘Oh, that was a very hopeful speech.’”

While Trump will likely convey to Republicans “some optimism about the mandate and the opportunity” of a second Trump term, Roe said, “It’s hard to call that positive. It’s like, yeah, let’s go punch these fuckers.”

Which is exactly the kind of rhetoric that animated his supporters in the first place — and that was so breaking with custom in his first inaugural address. In that speech, Trump blistered Washington and a decaying nation of rampant crime, “mothers and children trapped in poverty” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.” It was an aberration for an inaugural address ranking “on a scale of 1 to 10, about an 11,” said Russell Riley, the co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia.

Since then, Trump’s oratorical range has plunged to even lower registers.

At 78 and following two impeachments, one defeat, a raft of criminal cases and two apparent assassination attempts, his rhetoric has grown angrier and more rambling over time. In his campaign rallies last year, he demonized migrants and minority groups in racist and xenophobic diatribes.

“The sense you get from the campaign rhetoric is everything is bad, it’s corrupt, it’s rotten,” Riley said.

He cited Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and George Wallace, who brought their own “coarse contributions to rhetoric. But nothing like what we’ve experienced in the last 10 years or so.”

Much of that is Trump’s contribution. But in some ways, Riley said, “what he was doing was surfing the wave. He discovered that sort of coarsened rhetoric worked, so he took part in it, and he showed you could be successful politically for taking part in it. So these two things, they interact with one another, they build on one another. Presidential rhetoric always participates in the broader trends in the culture.”

There is another trend in the culture, too — our partisanship — reflected in Trump’s polarizing remarks in 2017, and likely again on Monday. He will take office amid contentious Cabinet appointment hearings. On Wednesday, Joe Biden — hardly an eloquent speaker, but not a crass one, either, at ease invoking Seamus Heaney or William Butler Yeats — warned in his grim farewell address of a democracy-threatening “oligarchy” in America.

Trump, said Ken Khachigian, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, would be well served to deliver a straightforward and restrained address. But it would be nonsensical, he said, for him to give a speech about this being “a time for warmth and unity, when hardly anybody means it.”

Even if he did deliver such an address, Khachigian said, “24 hours later [Chuck] Schumer’s going to have his stiletto out and try to cut his guts open.”

Political discourse in America, he said, has devolved into “a lot of anger all the time.”

Trump capitalized on that public sentiment in his campaign. And when it comes to anger in his speech-making, he’s on a planet of his own. It’s unclear what policies he will discuss on Monday. But he has promised to deport millions of immigrants starting on “Day One.” He has pledged to dismantle whole swaths of the bureaucracy and called forrevenge on his political enemies, including by prosecuting them.

“His inaugural address might be a reading of arrest warrants,” mused David Blaska, a former Dane County, Wisconsin, supervisor who worked as a speechwriter for former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and who supported Trump in 2020, but not in 2024.

“Part of the rapture,” Blaska said, “is that the sinners are cast into hell.”

Dasha Burns contributed to this report.

Politics

How SNAP could crunch the midterms

Published

1 day ago

October 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Under the political radar, the country’s food stamps program is undergoing a slow-motion transformation. The ramifications could bubble up into the midterms.

Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act are rolling out in phases, from tougher work requirements to restrictions on non-citizens. Food stamp rolls already shrank by more than 5 million people nationwide as of this summer, as the hardest-hit state, Arizona, saw an outright majority of its food stamp recipients lose benefits.

The latest alteration clicked into place Oct. 1, when the share of administrative costs states and counties have to pay rose to 75% from 50%. An even bigger financial shift looms in a year, when states with high payment error rates will have to assume some benefit costs for the first time, a scenario that’s already rippling through state and local budget planning.

It all adds up to a new era in federal-state relations — and in the size and nature of the welfare state.

In a year when affordability worries top voters’ priority lists and grocery prices strain their wallets, Democrats think the SNAP shift gives them an opening to make Republicans pay politically after the GOP used social safety net cuts to food aid and Medicaid to help pay for last year’s tax cuts.

“People are getting kicked off these programs at the very moment they’re going to the polls to vote,” House Agriculture ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) said. “I sure wouldn’t want to be a Republican headed into the November ballot.”

But Republicans think they have a compelling story to tell voters, trying to right-size a program that spends millions of dollars on erroneous payments. The SNAP changes align with the Trump administration’s broader push to crack down on fraud and make the government smaller or more efficient. Implementing stricter work requirements for welfare often polls well, and trying to move people toward work gets at the root causes of poverty, they argue.

“The premise is simple: Let’s make sure that this program is preserved for those truly in need, and that we aren’t squandering taxpayer dollars,” a senior USDA official told Playbook in an interview. “And let’s make sure that if folks are able-bodied, they are work training or volunteering for 20 hours per week.”

That doesn’t mean Republicans in competitive races are putting SNAP and Medicaid cuts front and center on the campaign trail. When they tout last year’s megalaw, new tax breaks typically lead the messaging. And 10 frontline GOP House campaigns didn’t respond to requests for interviews about how they can win on SNAP.

At the state and county level, some governments are scrambling to prepare for a massive cost shift, hitting at the same time as significant Medicaid changes. The resulting bureaucratic jumble has contributed to some of the SNAP losses this year, as recipients struggled to get through overtaxed call centers, some states cut staff, and others tightened their processes.

“It really sets up a change in the federal responsibility, and I view it as a slippery slope,” warned Barbara Guinn, New York’s commissioner of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. Her state is staring down a possible $1 billion added burden next year, though they’re advocating for a repeal of the benefits change. “Once they implement any kind of cost shift, I think it will be easier for them to take similar actions in the future.”

Whether to delay next year’s cost shift has already generated tensions over the farm bill in the Senate, where Democrats are demanding a longer postponement than Republicans’ offer of one year. Some Minnesota counties are considering significant property tax increases to pay for the extra costs, Craig said: “We’re going to be pushing hard for a two-year delay — at the request of, frankly, many of my Republican county commissioners, not just Democrats.”

Conservatives see the new calculus as a long overdue change to improve efficiency and incentivize program integrity. Improper payment rates are high in many states (though they comprise both over-payments and under-payments, and error rates are different from fraud). Those that reduce errors enough won’t have to take on paying the benefits. And even opponents of the changes think lower error rates are a worthy goal. SNAP rolls often ebb and flow with the economy, and the recent drop could reflect the job market pulling people out of need — or the removal of people who shouldn’t have been getting food stamps in the first place.

“There needs to be some level of accountability,” the USDA official said. States with high error rates “need to start to have skin in the game.”

But at a time when many households are already squeezed by inflation, the SNAP changes have correlated with higher numbers of Americans turning to charities to ward off hunger. The surge in people losing food aid came more quickly than expected. The unemployment rate hasn’t meaningfully changed. And the vast majority of large food banks in a recent NBC survey said they were grappling with higher demand, in part due to food stamp changes. Another rule kicking in the day after the midterms could lead to many retailers being bumped out of SNAP as places where low-income people can use their benefits.

For state governments, a set of sweeping operational changes are now underway to conform to new policy demands, often requiring more money or staffing at already under-resourced offices. And the budgetary stakes to get error rates lower are sky-high.

“It’s a really complicated, nuanced and confusing time for states who are trying to administer SNAP,” said Lauren Kallins, a senior legislative director at the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, which has advocated for a delay in the benefits costs shift.

Politics

David Plouffe warns Dems: Don’t take North Carolina for granted

Published

1 day ago

October 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

National Democrats are increasingly shifting their attention away from North Carolina’s Senate race as polls show former Gov. Roy Cooper ahead, eyeing once long-shot races as possible pickups. But a veteran Democratic strategist who helped deliver the party’s last presidential victory in the state is urging donors not to take a win for granted.

David Plouffe, who managed behind Barack Obama’s narrow 2008 victory in North Carolina, urged Democratic donors and supporters not to grow complacent in the final weeks of Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign, according to audio obtained by Blue Light News.

“I think that this race … has I think been the best run race in the country,” Plouffe said on the call. “But that doesn’t mean that we can rest easy.”

He warned about North Carolina’s relatively fixed partisan makeup as a purple state, making it difficult for a candidate to dramatically expand their base of support.

“There’s certain states that elections happen within a bound, and this one will be that way as well,” he said.

In public polling, Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley, who has struggled to boost his name recognition against the much better-known former governor. And as Democrats grow increasingly bullish on their candidate’s chances of flipping the seat — one of four pickups they need to take control of the Senate — national groups have begun shifting their money and attention to other contests, including most recently to Kansas.

But Plouffe said North Carolina needs to remain a priority.

“We have to win the ones we have to win,” he said on the call to Cooper’s finance committee.

Just days before Plouffe’s remarks, Senate Democrats’ top super PAC pulled back some of its spending in North Carolina, following a much bigger retreat by Republicans’ top super PAC in the state.

Plouffe cautioned that North Carolina has historically been a tough state for Democrats at the federal level, especially in recent years. The party hasn’t won a Senate race there since 2008, when Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state, winning by fewer than 15,000 votes. He lost the state in 2012.

“Even though we carried the electoral votes back then, we only did so by I think 14,000 votes. So it was our narrowest victory,” Plouffe said. “And in 2012, we tried to win North Carolina again with the help of so many people on this phone, and we just couldn’t get it done. And that tells you how difficult the state is.”

Plouffe also cast the stakes of Cooper’s race as extending beyond November, arguing that a Cooper victory could provide a blueprint for the party’s eventual 2028 presidential nominee.

“Democrats need to compete and win in North Carolina in 28,” he said. “And it’s one thing to look how a governor can win a state. The best route, the best scout that you receive, is how someone in a federal race won in a tough state, and that can show you the way.”