JUSTIN WEBB : Trump will restore pride

JUSTIN WEBB : Trump will restore pride



This was the speech of a man in a desperate hurry. No humour. No niceties. Down to business and the bluntest of descriptions of the task at hand: 'This American carnage,' as he called the state of much of the nation, 'stops right now.'

Eloquence? Language that lifts you up and makes your heart sing? Happy stuff? Gone.

Even Lincoln, in the midst of a civil war, managed to sound happier about the state of the nation.



But there is a reason why this was a blunt piece of work, a piece of nuggety, knarled, 'bash 'em' prose.

He has to get on with being Trump. He has to hurry because he needs to deliver. No President since Richard Nixon has come to office with more people expecting him to fall flat on his face.

Donald Trump is the most unpopular incoming commander-in-chief in modern times. Large numbers of influential Americans actively want their President to fail.



You could see the contempt in some of their eyes — 'Let's just see how this ends' — as they applauded from their seats around him.

So how does he prove them wrong? Through action.

They say that sharks die if they stop moving. True or not of sharks, it's certainly the case with presidencies. And this one is particularly shark-like.

Although they are suspicious of him, most Americans would agree that Donald Trump's energy is what has earned him this gig. He has to keep up the pace: he has to swim — and swim fast.

He spoke yesterday of healing divisions, and he needs America's top politicians to work with him, either because they respect him or because they fear him. It doesn't matter which. And for that, he needs a concrete programme that seems to be working.

In an inauguration speech possibly unprecedented in its pugnacity, he began with infrastructure, and rightly so. Anyone who knows America knows that the richest, most powerful nation on Earth is also a complete mess.

Try getting from JFK airport in New York to the centre of Manhattan. No proper public transport and clogged roads. Bridges around the country that are rusting and dangerous. Roads that are full of potholes.

Yes, it's not exactly going to the moon or curing cancer. But it really does matter, and if Trump can get money released fast to make America easier to get around, then chalk that up as a success.

So, the words the President used were not pretty, but the policies he outlined might make swathes of America look and feel much better. Greater, again.

He is going to end Islamist terror, he said.

It's tempting to laugh. The toughest soldier knows that killing ISIS and other terrorists is not enough. Political progress is part of defeating terror.

But I wonder whether large numbers of Americans have been hankering after a man who might just say what he wants to do in plain and simple style.

When I lived in Washington soon after 9/11, I remember going to a smart dinner party where the hostess proposed a toast before we ate: 'Death to al-Qaeda.'

My wife and I gulped. And yet I could understand the sense that Americans have that they have a huge military for which they pay very heavily, and they want — at least in the privacy of their own nation, as it were — to be able to say clearly what their intentions are and who their enemies are.



The Trump line about terror, which will have sounded so crass to so many people around the world, might have made a lot of sense in deepest West Virginia.

So, too, will the theme of American jobs for American workers that infused the whole speech. The issue here is not just jobs, it is the providing of jobs that pay well and let people live in dignity.

Of course a Democratic president could have said the same thing: America first and American jobs first. But whoever offers that message, the delivery of the promise is fiendishly difficult, and frankly Trump's speech gave little sense of how it was to happen.

But here is a taste of why it's not completely pie-in-the-sky. One of Trump's first acts will be a one-off tax cut for companies bringing money back into the country.

They will have a year to repatriate the trillions of dollars they hold offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. This is a wall of money. Even the small tax charge on it will go some way towards oiling the wheels of the Trump job creation machine.

The companies themselves will have plenty to spend on American factories and American workers if they choose. And given that China is becoming more expensive for companies looking for cheaper labour, Trump might be banging on an open door.

One of the more eloquent, if depressing, passages of the speech was where he talked of 'factories being scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation'. He does not need to get them all humming again. He cannot do that.

But just a few. Just a bit of work returning to the forsaken bits of America, the so-called 'flyover states' because fashionable folk only ever fly over them.