President Donald Trump took to the podium and give his inaugural address, which some are already calling the “Forgotten Man Speech.” It was a full-throated, populist restatement of the president’s agenda that he had pushed for throughout the campaign trail. If there was any reconciliation in the address, it was a call to reconcile behind him and what he now intends to do to remake the United States and to place the Barack Obama legacy upon the ash heap of history.
"The forgotten men and women of this country will be forgotten no longer," he declared to the crowd and the entire world through television and live streaming Internet.
He promised to rebuild the American economy and destroy America’s enemy, though not to impose her values on other countries. The United States would advance its values by example from now on. No more nation building.
“The Forgotten Man” was a theme occasionally touched on by President Franklin Roosevelt to refer to people whose lives had been ravaged by the Great Depression. Ironically, the phrase was a title of a recent critique of the New Deal by Amity Shlaes and referred to victims of that policy, which failed to address the underlining cause of the economic slowdown that ravaged the 1930s.
In 2017, the forgotten men and women, to use the more inclusive phrase, is meant to be ordinary people in the American heartland who have been ignored and even abused by the Washington elites.
Trump used that theme before when he was campaigning for president, to obvious great effect. Now he threw it and the theme behind it to the very same Washington elites who were seated near him and had to listen.
Trump has set himself up as the protector of the American people from the forces that would despoil them, both in Washington and overseas.
While the federal government has been passing laws and regulations to suit itself and not the people, foreign countries have been stealing from Americans through what Trump views as unfair trade views. Trump served notice that, as far as he is concerned, the practice will stop. Politicians both in America and abroad will have to adjust and hope that President Trump, as befits a man immersed in the art of the deal, is open to negotiation.
