It would be understandable to have forgotten, by the end of his 29-minute speech, that one of President Donald J. Trump’s first examples in his inaugural address was about extreme weather events. It would be even more understandable, after the flood of opening executive orders and threats of “shock and awe” deportation operations starting in Chicago, to have lost track of that example by the next day.
The example of weather events, however, crystallized Mr. Trump’s approach throughout his speech: There are obvious, common-sense answers to all the problems that plague America. Solutions will happen immediately, powered by renewed belief in American exceptionalism leading us to “win like never before” under Mr. Trump’s leadership. And even when things may be challenging or require effort, they are never, ever complicated.
Mr. Trump spoke about a “crisis of trust” because of a “government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home.” The mismanaged emergencies he pointed to were the flooding in North Carolina and other states and the fires in Los Angeles. He seemed particularly shocked that the fires were “even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now.”
While Asheville is still recovering from Hurricane Helene and more fires are still breaking out in Southern California, it can feel satisfying for someone to say, with the biggest bullhorn in the world, “This is broken, and I will fix it.” It is intoxicating to imagine that the reason these problems are not already solved is because the incompetent and corrupt powers-that-be are ignoring their urgency or fleecing their own nests.
But consider what Mr. Trump did not say. He did not mention climate change, either during that example or in the rest of his speech. He offered no acknowledgment that the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events have any underlying cause.
Nor did he acknowledge that any of his policies might have any risks or impose any costs, while promising to “drill, baby, drill,” to use the “liquid gold” under our feet to enrich the United States, to end the Green New Deal (which was only proposed and never enacted) and to revoke electric vehicle mandates (meaning fuel efficiency standards, since no mandate to buy an electric vehicle actually exists). One of his first executive orders was to withdraw the United States from the international Paris climate agreement, as he did during his first term.
The point is not just that Mr. Trump is wrong to ignore climate change, but that his rhetorical appeal is dependent on not having to wrestle with the fact that it is a legitimately hard problem for which policy solutions have trade-offs and costs, advantages and disadvantages. Of course, there are plenty of politicians who minimize any downsides to their policy proposals, but Mr. Trump often pretends that they do not even exist. For Mr. Trump, there are never competing goods to choose between, only the “golden age of America begin[ning] right now” through his commitment to “very simply, put America first.”
Once you notice this pattern, you will find it over and over again in Mr. Trump’s approach to governing. Control of migration does not need to be balanced even with the financial costs of policing the border, much less the human dignity of people on the other side of it. Because it is obviously a bad idea to give sanctuary to “dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions,” it does not matter either how many immigrants fall under that description or how much disruption and suffering will be inflicted on American communities in the effort to deport them.
Since no one wants to be taxed “to enrich other countries,” it does not matter that foreign aid is a vanishingly small portion of the budget, nor does it matter that using tariffs to “tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens” actually involves importers paying the tariffs and passing the cost along to American consumers and carries the risk of inflationary pressure. “Make the other guys pay” sounds enough like it ought to work that Mr. Trump can pretend the question is why other politicians have not been savvy enough to try it rather than the much harder question of whether it will work at all.
In Mr. Trump’s telling, there is no reason other than foolishness that the Panama Canal was turned over to the country within whose borders it exists, just as there is no geopolitical risk to be considered before asserting that we will take it back. The moral and practical costs of maintaining a zone of American control within another sovereign country simply are not a factor that needed to be considered either when the decision was made to return the canal to Panama or when announcing the intention to reclaim it.
Such oversimplification has proven an effective rhetorical technique for Mr. Trump, at least as measured by his electoral victory. I suspect that, as in his first term, it will be less successful as a model for governing the country, because trade-offs and competing goods cannot be dismissed in reality as easily as they can be during a campaign rally.
But that observation leaves open the question of how to present an effective rhetorical foil to Mr. Trump. Focusing primarily on correcting him—whether about outright lies or about outlandish policy promises—tends to play into his depiction of an out-of-touch, self-serving elite that rejects the “common sense” answers that he has ready to fix everything as soon as everybody else gets out of his way.
Instead, we need to remember that the common good can be presented as worth striving for and making sacrifices to attain. It requires just as much courage, urgency and common sense as anything Mr. Trump is proposing. And rather than depending on convincing people to ignore the human suffering caused by political choices as long as it happens to someone else, our resolve to pursue the common good is actually strengthened by paying attention to and finding solidarity with people in need. That approach of prioritizing those who are in need—even non-Americans—might seem foolish and weak compared to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric of American exceptionalism, but such foolishness is “wiser than human wisdom” and such weakness “stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25).
