Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

If anyone was thinking that President Donald Trump would break with the central themes of his campaign, they were quickly disabused of that by the first words he spoke as the 45th president of the United States.

Yes, there were the now-traditional gracious words to the departing First Family (though none for his defeated rival). There was inclusive rhetoric that “whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.”


But the most striking aspect of the address was how fully it echoed the animating themes of his campaign. Inaugural addresses often mark a sharp shift in tone from campaigning to governing, from revving up followers to reaching out to skeptics. Trump instead delivered a stump speech: A populist-nationalist blend of grievance and line-in-the-sand promises to upend business as usual, root and branch.

Where John Kennedy had said “we celebrate not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom,” Trump declared that we are marking not just a transfer of power from one party to another, but that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people. ... What matters is not which party controls the government, but whether government is controlled by the people.”

In words that might have easily been spoken by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, Trump said, “for too long, a small group in Washington has reaped the benefits. … Washington has flourished, but the people did not share … the establishment protected itself, but not the people of this country.” When Trump’s people suggested in recent days that the speech would be “Jacksonian,” they were understating the case: just as Andrew Jackson was the first outsider to come to the White House, Trump defined himself as clearly outside the inside-the-Beltway crowd.

Even more striking—and Jacksonian—was the nationalist tone of the speech. Just as he denounced Washington insiders for reaping benefits the people did not share, he said we’ve defended other nations’ borders but refused to defend our own, sent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen in disrepair and decay.

“America first! America first!” he declared. “Buy American and hire American!”

If you’re a leader of a nation abroad, you heard the equivalent not of an outstretched hand, but a clenched fist. (Which, indeed, he delivered at the end of the speech, arm raised.) You’re just like our establishment, was the message sent overseas. You’ve picked our pockets, but that’s over.

Fundamentally, Trump’s speech was another reminder that he came to power as something America has never seen before: an independent, “third party” candidate who figured out that the way to power was to seize control of one of the two major parties. From the moment he announced, virtually every political “expert” of every ideology was sure it was a doomed venture. After his election, the “wisdom” was that he would simply be the tool of the Republican congressional wing, blithely signing laws in the spirit of Mel Brooks in “Blazing Saddles.” If there’s one key takeaway from this speech, it’s that this notion—and the very idea of a pivot, or the office changing the man—is at complete odds with Trump’s entire adult life.

Trump intends to do what he said he would do—exhilarating, delusional, or alarming as that prospect may be to the Americans listening to his words.