ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump says unity will be the theme of his inaugural address on Monday.
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DONALD TRUMP: We're going to have a message that will make you happy, unity. It's going to be a message of unity. And again, I think success brings unity.
SHAPIRO: That's what he said on NBC's "Meet The Press" last month, and it's a familiar presidential theme. NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: The most memorable line from Trump's first inaugural address is probably this one.
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TRUMP: This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
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KEITH: What came shortly after that was an appeal for unity.
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TRUMP: The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity. We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity.
KEITH: The next day, the streets of Washington, D.C., and other major cities were filled with pink-hatted protesters, punctuating just how divided the nation was. While in office, Trump often stoked divisions and rarely reached across the aisle. And during the most recent presidential campaign, he described his political opponents as, quote, "enemies from within." Compromise isn't really part of Trump's brand. Four years ago, President Biden took the oath of office only two weeks after Trump supporters had stormed the capitol to try to stop the certification of Biden's win.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy - unity, unity.
KEITH: Biden leaned so hard into the idea of bringing the country together that he proclaimed his inauguration day as a national day of unity.
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BIDEN: I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new.
KEITH: He was right. Unity certainly proved elusive for Biden and, before him, President Barack Obama, who campaigned on the idea that there was no red America or blue America. It was a main theme in Obama's inaugural address.
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BARACK OBAMA: On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
KEITH: There's a long history of presidents pleading for unity in their inaugurals only to preside over a period of discord. Never was that more true than for President Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his first inaugural address just before the Civil War began and his second shortly before the war ended.
TED WIDMER: Unity is a fiction.
KEITH: Ted Widmer is a professor at the City University of New York and a Lincoln biographer. He says, Unity is a vague, feel-good concept most presidents include in their inaugural addresses.
WIDMER: The rest of politics, anything goes, but then it's almost like the night before Christmas - we want to hear this very specific thing, and unity is at the top of the list, unity and what a great country we are.
KEITH: A better analogy may be an overly optimistic New Year's resolution. Allison Prasch is a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, who specializes in presidential rhetoric.
ALLISON PRASCH: Even if presidents don't use the word unity, it is a recurring theme across almost all inaugural addresses, even though they are going to define that in different ways.
KEITH: For some, it is uniting against some external force, like the Soviet Union back during the Cold War. For others, it's grasping for bipartisanship. Prasch says the most successful speeches explicitly acknowledge the differences that do exist.
PRASCH: We're not covering over difference of opinion, but we come together in spite of that. And I think that recognition really then can strengthen the possibility of unity.
KEITH: She says, differences always exist within a democracy. That's part of the design. Tamara Keith, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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