WASHINGTON — In what would be a political makeover for the ages, Donald Trump says that moments after he takes the oath of office next month, he’ll cast himself as something notably off-brand: a unifier.
The theme of his inaugural address? “Unity,” he told Kristen Welker, moderator of NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” in a recent interview.
“It will make you happy: unity,” he said. “It’s going to be a message of unity.”
What that means in practice is, for now, anyone’s guess. Trump rose to power in 2016 by dint of a divided electorate. He lost the White House four years later and won it back last month by delivering much the same hard-line message in much the same blunt terms.
At 78, Trump isn’t about to reinvent himself, nor has he given any sign that he’s rethinking the polarizing positions he has taken on mass deportations or pardoning those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress counted the electoral votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
He remains plainly and vocally bitter about how he says he has been wronged by judges, prosecutors, Democratic officials and the news media. In the interview in which he called for unity, he singled out House members who investigated the Jan. 6 attack and said they should be jailed.
“We’re not in a happy, clappy time,” Steve Bannon, a senior White House adviser in Trump’s first term, said in an interview. “Kamala Harris’ ‘politics of joy’ failed. Why? Because the lived experience of Americans is not joyous right now. That’s why Trump won in landslide.”
Still, some Trump advisers say he’s sincere about wanting to bridge the political chasm. They said he’s uniquely positioned to do so now that he has waged his last campaign and hopes to cement a favorable place in history.
Something unexpected happened in the election on Nov. 5. Voting blocs that had previously shunned Trump gave him a fresh look. He racked up gains among Hispanic and Black voters in key states who are normally part of the Democratic coalition as he won the popular vote for the first time in his three tries.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the election found that most Americans approved of Trump’s plans for the future. While a majority doubted that Trump could broker a detente between red and blue America, a larger share had warmer feelings about him than was the case at the ends of the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Having essentially vanquished the Democratic Party in Congress and [won the] popular vote and the electoral vote, I think he sees that there’s a major opportunity here for bipartisanship and breakthroughs,” said Dick Morris, an informal political adviser to Trump over the years and once a campaign adviser to Bill Clinton. “And I think he feels that people are exhausted from conflict on both sides and there’s a real chance here for him to open up a new front.”
John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, said it would be a mistake to dismiss his call for a national rapprochement out of hand.
“As a businessman, Trump is not a typical politician,” McLaughlin said in an interview. “When he tells you something, he’s being very direct, and you should take him at his word.
“He’s going to try to unify the country,” McLaughlin continued. “Trump is going to only have one term. There will be opposition to him. But he’d like to have a historic presidency and accomplish more for the country.”
Binding up a fractured nation is a goal that recent presidents have shared and none have reached. Americans have been in a bad mood: anxious about the future and unhappy with political leadership, polling shows. One of the few patches of common ground is a collective belief that the nation’s political system is broken, surveys show.
Biden mentioned “unity” nearly a dozen times in his inaugural speech in 2021, yet two-thirds of Americans now believe that the country has gotten more polarized since he took office, a Monmouth University poll found.
For Trump, a starting point might be spelling out what he means when he says he wants to narrow the political rift.
In his mind, does that mean his rivals should stifle their policy objections and line up behind his agenda? Or does it mean that he’ll compromise with Democratic lawmakers and end the attacks on those who defy him?
“No one has ever gotten rich betting on Donald Trump to do the right thing, because he never does,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a center-left think tank.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump transition spokeswoman, said in a statement: “President Trump will serve ALL Americans, even those who did not vote for him in the election. He will unify the country through success.”
With millions watching live, the inauguration would be the obvious forum for Trump to commit himself to healing, rather than stoke national divisions.
Every president hopes at least some part of his inaugural address will prove memorable. Abraham Lincoln’s two speeches bookending the Civil War reached poetic heights. Ronald Reagan’s address in 1981 set a tone for the new administration: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Trump’s first inaugural address was remembered mostly for the term “American carnage.” After he finished, a mystified former President rge W. Bush remarked, “That was some weird s—.”
Bannon recommended that Trump try something new this time — a gesture that could unite right, left and center given the intense dissatisfaction with the lawmakers who will be sitting on risers directly behind him.
“The only thing I would recommend to President Trump is if he wants to unify the country is that halfway through the speech, pivot the podium around, face the Washington, D.C., political class sitting in the risers and read them the riot act,” Bannon said. “Tell them things are going to change, that there’s a new sheriff in town. Then, turn back around and finish the speech facing the American people. That will unite the country.”
Oftentimes, the high-minded prose in an inaugural speech is quickly forgotten in the pell-mell rush to get the new presidency off the ground.
The ultimate test will be not so much the words Trump speaks from the teleprompter but the actions he takes over the next four years, analysts said.
Ted Widmer, a speechwriter in Clinton’s White House and now a history professor at City University of New York, said in an interview: “If ‘unity’ were followed up by actual policies that promote unity — like bringing Democrats into his Cabinet and working with Democrats in Congress on legislation that meets the needs and desires of a lot of different kinds of Americans — that would be great. But nobody expects that. It’s slash-and-burn already, and he’s not even president yet. He just nominates extremists to his Cabinet.”
