Trump tried to deliver an inspirational speech to graduates. It quickly became uncomfortable

It was an all-American rollercoaster of a speech. Donald Trump spoke to the assembled graduates of the US Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, offering advice, congratulating them on their success … and also commenting on their bodies and going off on a tangent about every political achievement he considers himself to have made.

Introduced by new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin — who clarified that Trump believes in “peace through strength,” an awkward claim as the Iran war festers in the background, that he quickly modified to “but some people only understand strength — the president took the stage.

“Our country is hot,” Trump said, while “under the last administration, we were a dead country.” Iran’s military is decimated, the president added: “Everything’s gone… The only question is: do we go in there and finish the job or do we sign a document?” Admin or annihilation? It’s all just part of Donald’s Wednesday morning routine.

He managed, over the next few minutes, to utter some fairly normal-sounding words about proud parents and hard workers — the stuff you expect at graduation. But when tasked with calling individual graduates up to the lectern to shake their hands for various achievements, it all fell apart again.

“I hate good-looking men,” the 79-year-old Trump said, unprompted, as a young man being recognized for his excellent academic record approached the stage. When the student who’d scored highest in the fitness test came up, he told the crowd: “I wanna check him out … Look at the muscles on this guy! I just hit him on the shoulder and hurt my hand, it’s like hitting a rock!”

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The reason Trump cares about this stuff, he added, is because “it’s competition for me too. I have to compete with you now!” What that means is anyone’s guess, but never mind, because the next name on the list was the class president, who just happened to be Trump’s Achilles’ heel: a woman.

“If I didn’t invite her up, I'd be accused of discrimination,” was what the president said when he came to Savannah Riera’s name. If that line sounds familiar to you, it’s because he used it a few months ago for the gold medal-winning women’s Olympic hockey team, when he “joked” that he would have to invite them to the State of the Union alongside their male counterparts for the same reason.

It went down badly then — multiple team members said they found the joke distasteful, and none of the team showed up to the event — but Trump didn’t let that stop him from repeating it for the Coast Guard Academy. It’s perhaps a bit of light trolling, but it also speaks to a fundamental lack of emotional intelligence: it seems the president can’t understand how deeply demoralizing that might be for a hardworking graduate to hear, aside from any so-called woke politics.

Awkwardly, it was Savannah who was then tasked with presenting Trump an official gift at the end of the ceremony, too. He gave her a “USA” cap in return, and she smiled thinly.

But never mind, because off he went full-tilt into another stream-of-consciousness rant about politics. Was it relevant to the Coast Guard commencement? Who cares! DC was once “run by foolish politicians who thought they could defy the laws of world history.” Biden had “open borders. People came in totally unchecked and unvetted,” including 25 million murderers and drug-dealers, “more than 50%” of whom had committed “more than one murder,” all pouring in from “prisons,” “mental institutions” and “insane asylums” (it’s unclear what differentiates those two, but perhaps Donald can one day enlighten us.)

The crowd fell into silence. Trump continued on about “the best crime numbers in history” — which means low crime, he added, when he seemed to realize that quote didn’t sound as clear in his head as it did out loud — and then took a turn into a long, long aside about illegal aliens. There were a couple of smattered bits of applause, an isolated cheer or two.

“We are now in the golden age,” Trump said, with more people working today “than at any time in the history of our country.” It’s not true, but that’s hardly relevant. Then there was more stuff about the Biden administration and, all of a sudden: “We’re building plants, auto plants, every kind of plant you can imagine… They stole our auto business, they stole our chips business… It was taken by other places, it was taken by Taiwan. I’m not knocking it… but if you had the right president, that would never have happened.”

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Impossibly, there was then a long aside about tariffs — “This is my favorite word in the dictionary, the word tariff” — cushioned by a bizarre claim that “the fake news media” had pursued him for liking the word tariff, since apparently he should like the words God and wife and family better.

And then, revved up on the fuel of his earlier words, he started to shout: “We will not let Iran have a nuclear weapon!” Again, a small amount of applause. He took a breath, added that “we may have to hit them harder but maybe not.” And right away we were back into other things that were tangentially related at best to the Coast Guard: drug dealers traveling by sea, the abduction of Maduro from Venezuela, Space Force (“my baby”.)

After almost an hour, it seemed that he was ready to round off his speech: he announced that he was going to offer a few words of hard-won life advice to the graduates. And, despite it all, this is probably where it became most weird.

We’ve all become accustomed to this way that Trump does political rhetoric — the ideological stream-of-consciousness, the personal and political attacks, and the bombastic self-congratulation. But what’s most shocking at this point is how little he has to say when he gets the opportunity to speak from the heart. Those final words of advice were so basic and cliched as to be effectively meaningless.

“Never, ever give up,” the president of the United States said, as if he were imparting some closely guarded secret. Also: “think big.” And lastly, “work hard.” Next on the roster, presumably, was ‘live, laugh, love’.

It’s astounding that this is how a beleaguered president with a free-falling approval rating would choose to connect with the youth of today: in such banal, low-effort terms. These are sentences he’s wheeled out before, at previous commencement ceremonies. He’s had time to ruminate; time to workshop them with a friend or a speechwriter or an adviser or perhaps with Melania. So why does it come down to something you’d expect to see written in Helvetica over a stock image of a waterfall? Is this really the best America can do when asked for insight?

The country is experiencing a delicate geopolitical moment. Now is the time for statesmanship and reassurance. Instead, we have Donald Trump fist-pumping from behind a sheet of bulletproof glass at a graduation ceremony, doing a Village People routine of cosplaying as a construction worker one day and a member of the Coast Guard the next. For Trump, every room is a mirror and every speech is a rally. Every new person he encounters needs to have their physicality commented upon. And every opportunity to be vulnerable or heartfelt leads right back to a dollar-store calendar of inspirational quotes from 1995.

“Two years ago, three years ago, we had a country that was rudderless, just like the ship that had its rudder blown off,” he concluded. Well. Those were certainly words. Extract from them what you will.

Congratulations, class of 2026.

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