The old Washington advice that Americans should watch what a president does and not what he says needs an urgent update.
Donald Trump intends to say and do the very same things.
That was the message and meaning of his unorthodox inauguration speech.
He sat in the Oval Office before and the four years he spent trying to get back there have given him plenty of time to decide what he wants to do.
The result is that his 30-minute address wasn’t one of those that is chock full of soaring rhetoric that reaches for the sky but has a shelf-life that can be measured in seconds and bears little resemblance to an actual agenda.
Trump’s speech is his battle plan.
A shorthand version would be “I told you many times what I’m going to do, so let’s start doing it right now.”
While some commentators likened the plans he described to a typical State of the Union address, I believe it was much more operational than aspirational.
Trump means business when he says that “From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
And that “We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed. For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day.”
Nice words, and he immediately made a down payment on them by spending much of the day signing scores of executive orders and actions aimed at turning the promises into reality.
Pushing back
Securing our borders is necessarily at the top of the list, which he has correctly described as an emergency because Joe Biden opened the door to more than 10 million unvetted newcomers.
The rule of law was trashed and the immigration system rendered null and void because all you had to do to get into America was walk across the border and give patrol agents your name.
Bingo — you were in.
Oh, and here’s a bus ticket, a debit card and a phone.
The ease masks the costs to taxpayers, both in money and in blood because of the large criminal element that accepted Biden’s offer.
Here’s something else to consider about Trump: The 47th president is a different man from the 45th president.
Eight years ago, he was new to Washington, an unlikely winner and an outsider.
Even he appeared to be in a state of shock when he learned he had defeated Hillary Clinton.
He subsequently cut a lonely figure in a town that fiercely protects its fiefdoms, and many Republicans, not to mention every Democrat and most of the Deep State, were out to destroy him or at least hobble his movement of forgotten Americans.
The mass protests against his election, the Russia Russia Russia hoax, the first impeachment, the blizzard of lawsuits, the media frenzy — all were parts of a plot to send him packing.
Even some on his own team sabotaged him.
He had crashed the party, and had to pay a price.
The press corps still hasn’t gotten over the way he obliterated their gatekeeping rules.
As Sen. Chuck Schumer warned days before Trump took office back then, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
The president was ostracized, with even First Lady Melania Trump, a former top model, shunned by the fashion industry that fell all over itself to dress and canonize her predecessors.
Although Trump, by sheer willpower, achieved significant successes at home and abroad, he was eventually repelled like a foreign body as the old regime reclaimed its power and privileges.
Joe Biden gave them what they wanted, so he got what he wanted.
A changed man
As a sheer political comeback, Trump’s second coming has been well documented, but something he said Monday goes to the core of what has fueled his grit and stamina.
“Just a few months ago, in that beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason.”
“I was saved by God to make America great again.”
That’s the ultimate motivation and something he has expressed in various ways since the moment he stood up from the stage, his face bloodied, and pumped his fist while shouting “fight, fight, fight.”
In the immediate aftermath of his brush with death, he talked about trying to unify the nation, and said he believed “success” would go a long way to curing the bitter polarization.
Now it’s clear he has reached an unshakable resolve about which policies could bring that success.
If nothing else, Biden has helped point the way with his outrageous departure.
The efforts to tie Trump’s hands with executive orders on ocean drilling and similar measures were bad enough, but Biden’s preemptive pardons of his entire family and those who ran the Jan. 6 kangaroo-court process are beyond the pale.
One result is that Biden has justified virtually any and all pardons and commutations Trump decides to issue for Jan. 6 defendants.
To do otherwise is to accept a two-tiered system of justice, with a lenient one for well-connected Dems and a harsher one for everybody else.
To be sure, no matter what Trump does, the political forecast calls for rough sailing ahead.
Lawsuits against his border actions already are being filed and the GOP majority in the House is as small as can be.
Nonetheless, the days of having a president who is sleep-walking America into one disaster after another are thankfully over.
The nation now has the right president at the right time and he is focused on the right policies.
Godspeed to him.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
