There will be only two genders in America, he said, male and female. There will be no preferences for electric vehicles. There will be no escape from tariffs for other countries. And there will be no misunderstanding when it comes to the mission of the military. The Panama Canal will be taken, with the implication that he will do so by force if necessary. And the Gulf of Mexico will be renamed the Gulf of America, he claimed.
The speech had echoes of the angry jeremiad that he delivered in his 2017 inaugural address, which was uncompromising in tone and contained few of the traditional grace notes.
Eight years ago, Mr. Trump described “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” schools that teach students nothing, and “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
-On Monday, he accused the government of “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life” and said his predecessor had overseen years of a “chronic disease epidemic.”
To the extent that Mr. Trump expressed hope eight years ago, it was the hope that he would succeed in advancing his agenda.
