Obama Pod Bros Say Trump Was on to Something With Bizarre Inauguration Speech

The former Obama aides of Pod Save America had a surprising take on President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, saying Democrats could learn something from Trump’s bizarre address.

Instead of the “sweeping rhetoric of an inaugural address that’s meant for the history books,” Trump got very specific very quickly with the kind of policy talk that’s usually reserved for campaign stump speeches, former speechwriter Jon Favreau said in Tuesday’s episode.

“To me that’s a little more modern,” he said. “The next Democratic president, I’d like them just to get to business. Just talk about what they’re going to do for the country,” he said.

That’s not to say the Pod guys didn’t also have plenty of criticism for Trump’s remarks, which had a lot to live up to after the infamous “American carnage” address he gave during his first inauguration in 2017.

After being sworn-in on Monday, Trump declared himself God’s chosen one, and then dunked at length on former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Using many of the same lines he’d used in 2017, the speech was the “most self-involved, self-referential” inaugural address of all time, with a fair amount of Stephen Miller-style fear-mongering, Favreau concluded.

Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff for policy, almost certainly wrote the 30-minute address.

The swearing-in ceremony had been moved inside to the Capitol Rotunda, where there were only enough seats for the president-elect and vice president-elect’s families, former presidents and first ladies, Cabinet members and nominees, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires who had donated $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.

For anyone who didn’t get one of the 600 coveted seats in the Rotunda, an overflow room with 1,800 folding chairs and jumbo screens was set up for other Republican lawmakers, giving the proceedings a very upstairs-downstairs vibe, according to Politico.

The MAGA faithful who had gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend the swearing-in ceremony were relegated to Capital One Arena a mile away.

Minutes after leaving the swearing-in ceremony at the Rotunda, Trump headed downstairs to an overflow area and launched into another 30 minutes of off-the-cuff remarks in which he assured the second crowd they were younger, “more powerful” and better looking than the people upstairs.

Five hours later, he made his way to the Capital One Arena, where his inaugural parade had been moved indoors due to the cold.

“I think moving all the events inside and only doing things with tech CEOs and billionaire donors—while the MAGA faithful have nothing to do, or go to some giant arena where they get ignored—that’s kind of a perfect metaphor for how I imagine this whole thing is going to go,” Pod host Tommy Vietor said of Trump’s second term in office.