Who Wrote Donald Trump’s Inauguration Speech? Report Reveals The Two Men Behind The Address
A tweet from earlier this week showing Donald Trump looking busy writing his inauguration speech is, just as many had suspected, not what it’s cracked up to be. That was the main takeaway in a new report suggesting that the address was, in fact, written by two of the U.S. President’s top advisors.
The internet got busy on Wednesday, two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, as a tweet of him ostensibly writing his inauguration address three weeks earlier went viral and became fodder to many a meme or parody image. According to a report from Mashable, the staged nature of the photo and Trump’s “cold, dead gaze” were particular talking points, but not as much as how the President seemed to be holding a closed Sharpie marker.
Soon after Trump tweeted the “speech writing” photo, social media was soon flooded with edited versions of the original image, with the new versions showing poorly-written letters to Vladimir Putin, in-eloquent addresses written in a child’s handwriting, and, in one simple example, a close-up of the closed Sharpie used by Trump in the original image. But a report from CNN suggested that Donald Trump did draft his own inauguration speech, citing two “senior transition officials” who chose not to be named.
However, a new report from The Hill citing a subscriber-only piece from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Trump didn’t write the speech after all, thereby confirming what many netizens had thought – the image of Trump writing his speech while at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida was merely staged, and someone else was responsible for the content of the inaugural address.
So who wrote the speech if it wasn’t Donald Trump? According to an anonymous White House official, the address was prepared by two of his advisors – Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Stephen Miller, the latter of whom had prepared speeches for Trump during the campaign period. The Hill noted that the Bannon and Miller-penned speech was “unusual” in the sense that it had Trump painting a picture of America as a “country ruled by a selfish political class.”
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Bannon defended what he and Miller had included in the Donald Trump inauguration speech, suggesting that it was one of the most powerful addresses delivered in close to 200 years.
“I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House. It’s got a deep, deep root of patriotism. It’s got a deep, deep root of patriotism.It was an unvarnished declaration of the basic principles of his populist and nationalist movement. It was given in a very powerful way.”
Bannon was referring to the inauguration speech of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States who served from 1829 to 1837. A report from Reason underscored Jackson’s status as the “first populist president” of the U.S., and how his concise, yet powerful inauguration address stressed that his victory was a “demonstration of public sentiment.”
While Trump’s allies have been quick to compare his relatively short address on Friday to that of one of America’s first presidents, The Independent wrote that the Donald Trump inauguration speech was also compared to the dialogue delivered by movie villain Bane, a character played by Tom Hardy in Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Knight Rises. Observers had particularly centered on the part where Bane had taken Gotham City over from corrupt politicians, and how Trump talked about “transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back [to the] people) in his address.
[Featured Image by J. Scott Applewhite – Pool/Getty Images]
