First, naturally, he gave himself props, saying, “We’re getting great reviews on the speech.”
Ever the showman, he said he would give this audience “the A-plus treatment,” not the “A treatment, the B treatment, the C, the D or the F. You know what the F is? ‘Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Bye-bye.’” But as we all know, Trump is a man who loves to talk about himself, Castro-esque in his volubility, so he never does an F treatment.
He offered the inside story of his Inaugural Address, saying that Melania and JD Vance had persuaded him to take out praise for the Jan. 6 rioters, whom he referred to as “hostages.”
It certainly would have been creepy if he had said he was pardoning them while he was making his address in the very Capitol they ransacked — an attempted coup that led to Trump’s second impeachment. (He would commute the sentence of Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, and pardon roughly 1,500, nearly all of those charged in the attack, before the Commander in Chief Ball.)
There was a vivid reminder of that bloody day when Mike Pence walked into the Rotunda with Dan Quayle. When Trump was pressuring Pence not to certify Biden’s win, Pence called the former vice president and fellow Indianan to ask his advice. Quayle told him, “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”
Setting aside his promise of unity, Trump trashed his foes who tried to hold him to account for Jan. 6, including Liz Cheney (“She’s a crying lunatic”), Adam Kinzinger (“a super crier”) and Nancy Pelosi (“guilty as hell”). He was more benign about Hillary, noting “She didn’t look too happy today” but allowing that she’s “a very nice person.”