Not only did U.S. President Donald Trump lie about writing his inauguration speech but he also handed over the responsibility of setting the tone for his reign to his chief advisor and white supremacist Steve Bannon, as it has been revealed that he and Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy advisor, wrote the president’s first speech.
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“Much of the speech was written by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, two of Mr. Trump’s top advisers,” the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, citing a White House official.
One of the most troubling aspects of the speech was when Trump said that “America First” is the “new vision (that) will govern the land.”
The phrase “America First” was a slogan used by the 1930s America First Committee which was has been labeled an isolationist, anti-Semitic group that opposed called for negotiating with Hitler instead of joining Europe’s war against the fascist regime.
“Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, like the candidate himself, was a chain of falsehoods, saber-rattling and scary Neofascist uber-nationalism,” Juan Cole wrote for his website Informed Comment Sunday.
Slamming the phrase as “ugly,” Cole touched on another part of the speech where Trump, who has packed his administration with billionaires, spoke of transferring the power from Washington to “the people.”
Cole noted parallels between Trump’s speech and speeches from right-wing Germans in the 1930s where the German phrase “Das Volk” or “the people” was used as a reference for unity between white German peasants and the landlords in an attempt to alienate the intellectuals and those who sought to bring about progress.
“It comprised the German people as an organic whole, uniting great landlord and lowly peasant. The great German corporations, too, were said to be expressions of “the people,” Cole argued in his critique of the controversial speech.
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“The phrase comes into focus if you understand “the people” as “white Protestants and some lately admitted ethnic Catholics” who are united across social class (though of course led by their billionaire betters), and who stand in contrast to the cosmopolitans, the mixed-race people, infiltrating minorities, the socialists and others bent on diluting “the people” and subverting its prosperity and power by kowtowing to foreigners.”
Cole and many others argued that speech sounded more like a campaign speech than one appropriate for an elected president.
Instead of attempting to unite the people he now rules, whether supporters or opponents, his speech was full of hostility towards those who did not agree with him and his policies. “This American carnage,” President Trump stressed, “stops right here and stops right now.”