COM Students Write Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address

It seemed a fun assignment: write Donald Trump’s inaugural address as he might write it. But for Hannah LeBlanc (COM’18), it “was one of the most challenging assignments this semester.” For too many of her 21 years, she’d watched her mother endure cruel taunts because of a disabling bone condition. Now LeBlanc had to write a speech for a man who, during his campaign, had mocked a reporter with a disability, which had left her mom in tears.

LeBlanc wasn’t alone in being troubled by the assignment, part of two classes that met jointly in the fall: the College of Arts & Sciences course Special Topics in the History of Media and the College of Communication course The Presidency and the Media.

“A few students were really dismayed at the thought of writing in Trump’s voice and point of view,” says Christopher Daly, a COM professor of journalism, who taught the latter class. “I told them that we believe that a major goal of a liberal education is to understand another person’s point of view.”

Fellow instructor Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History, tethered his Special Topics course to Daly’s for the first time ever last semester, to coincide with the election. The goal of the joint classes, he says, was to introduce students to the changing role of news and entertainment in American politics. Writing Trump’s inaugural address was “an exercise in imagination and historical empathy.”

Befitting Trump’s rhetoric, the students’ speeches are long on promises to “make America great again” and exhortations to “trust me” on great pledges. And like many past inaugural addresses—and much of Trump’s policy-light campaign—they are short on specifics. Following are excerpts from some of the students’ work.