On the afternoon of Jan. 20, students gathered for an inaugural address viewing and discussion event held by the Politics Department, run by Rhetoric Professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano and Politics Professor Stephen Engel.
The event commenced with Kelley-Romano’s opening remarks, in which she described presidential inaugurations and speeches to be a “point of unification” that tended to bring the nation together during a transition of power. With this, as she looked ahead to what may come of Trump’s speech she mentioned she was going to pay attention to the use of the words “American patriot” and the rights and freedoms she anticipated he would associate with the American patriot, referring not to the citizens of the United States, but a more narrow subgroup, the wealthy white.
President-elect Trump’s speech, projected in the classroom for students to listen to and watch, evoked immediate and emotional reactions from the group of students attending, particularly when Trump outlined his plans to sign a series of executive orders on his first day in office including directives on immigration enforcement, diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and national recognition of only two genders.
Afterwards, Engel and Kelley-Romano led a detailed analysis of the speech and its political implications.
Engel began the post-speech discussion by commenting on the paradoxical tone of Trump’s delivery. He noted that the speech was marked by a mix of “anger and lackluster low energy,” creating a dissonance between the content of the speech and how he was voicing it.
He then turned to the broader themes of the speech, particularly the theme of “reclamation and angry populism” that Trump employed in his speech. While the speech contained familiar tropes of American exceptionalism, echoing the optimism and unity often seen in inaugural addresses, Engel argued that Trump’s version was more self-focused as he took “the theme of exceptionalism and applied it to himself showing a theme of person grievance…and an unnuanced attempt at American exceptionalism.”
Kelley-Romano expanded on this point, emphasizing that while the norm of an inaugural speech is to reunify the nation, those themes were undermined with his inward-looking approach that was “centered in individual strength and subsequent closedness.”
The conversation then progressed to discussion surrounding the political agenda Trump outlined in his inaugural address that will take aim at racial equality efforts, transgender and gender nonconforming rights and undocumented immigrants. Trump vowed to sign over 100 executive orders on his first day of presidency regarding DEI policy, energy, border and refugee policy, the overturning of birthright citizenship, free speech, persecution of political opponents, and more. Engel dug into these executive orders he mentioned in his address and spoke to the implications of each.
Notably, Engel looked at the president-elect’s plan to dismantle DEI initiatives across the federal government and commented that the termination of these initiatives will extend further to institutions of higher education, such as Bates, and raised concern for its “conditioning of private and public institutions of higher education.” Engel raised specific concerns about the potential effects of this order on Bates’ Race, Power, Priviledge, and Colonialism requirement beginning for the class of 2030, which he argues could face pushback in this new political climate.
Engel and Kelley-Romano then opened up the space for questions and comments from students in which some expressed curiosity about the lack of mention of abortion policy in Trump’s speech and what signing these executive orders entailed for the nation at large.
Engel suggested that Trump’s avoidance of the topic was strategic as he is aware it is a “loser” for the Republican party given the generally wide-spread bipartisan support for abortion rights. Kelley-Romano concurred, noting while Trump did not address abortion directly, his constant references to the Christian right and the role of God being our guiding arbiter has implications in and of itself.
Engel lastly addressed how executive orders are a tool for the executive to reinterpret and develop a new understanding of existing laws, and that Trump’s use of executive orders would reshape the administrative state in profound ways.
