White House gatekeepers no longer post the president’s campaign speeches online
Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, argued in an opinion column published by The Guardian on November 3, 2026, that President Donald Trump has delivered the worst speeches ever given by a US president. Widmer, the editor of American Speeches and the author of the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America, traced that judgment to a two-month stretch of campaign rallies that included 28 of them, with the result of the election still unknown. He wrote that the United States had seen plenty of terrible speeches over the centuries, but Trump’s midterm rallies marked a new low, going beyond speeches that were merely convoluted or dull.
Widmer’s case rests on the content of the addresses. He described them as routinely overflowing with vitriol against perceived enemies, groundless predictions of victory and delusions of grandeur. The media, he wrote, had reported with some bemusement about the strangeness of Trump’s 28 rallies, but the problem was more serious: many of the speeches made little sense, and the president often lost his way. At their best, the rallies offered a form of entertainment to the “Maga supporters who still line up, in dwindling numbers.” At their worst, they provided evidence of a president whose faculties were failing him.
Widmer’s institutional complaint concerned verification. He wrote: “It used to be vitally important for any White House speechwriter, under any previous administration, to factcheck a speech.” It was, he said, unthinkable to state a known falsehood in a presidential address. He concluded that it is now impossible to rely on anything communicated from the most powerful office in the world, whether in the torrent of rally speeches now ending or in the nightly stream of social media posts. He argued that Trump had lowered the bar further than in his first term, or even the first year of his second term.
Widmer also contrasted current access with past White House practice. Past White Houses, he wrote, routinely put every presidential utterance on the website on the belief that doing so served the public interest. The current gatekeepers refuse to put Trump’s rally speeches online, as if conscious that they were lowering the dignity of the office, he wrote, so the speeches must be read elsewhere.
The episodes Widmer cited were specific. At a North Carolina rally, Trump told the story of Mike Dukakis and Willie Horton twice in the same speech. Widmer also pointed to non-sequiturs such as “only a Hispanic could survive that fall,” threats to rename oceans and rivers, boasts about the “freaking fortune” the oil industry was making from the Iran war, and casual pardons issued from the stage to polluters, which he said left one lucky recipient “as clean as a newborn baby’s ass.” He called the pattern a race to the bottom and said the language was frequently profane. In Ohio, Trump said: “We’re going to win, and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass.” The number of Maga supporters willing to line up, Widmer wrote, was dwindling. Hecklers were arriving in ever greater numbers, drawn to “the spectacle of this bonfire,” and Trump taunted them with “shut up, loser!”
Widmer listed other targets: insults to foreign countries, including “Norway sucks”; taunts at political rivals; Robert DeNiro, whom he said Trump called “a moron”; repeated references to the firmness of Jon Husted’s posterior; and juvenile nicknames for opponents — Talafreako, Annie Trannie and Dumocrats. He also said it was not simply that Trump, “as if defensive,” bragged about acing his cognitive tests — “I’m a freaking genius.” Beyond that, Widmer said, the speeches showed an absence of “any moral leadership of any kind, on issues ranging from our foreign policy to domestic concerns.”
Widmer set the present against the founders. Judging bad speeches was not simple, he wrote, because there had been many over the years, going back to the founders, some of whom dreaded speaking in public. George Washington’s inaugural address did not begin promisingly, he wrote, with a halting first sentence: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.” Widmer said the founders anticipated some of the problems. Washington warned that the “baneful effects” of excessive partisanship would “enfeeble” the nation. His successor, John Adams, worried that the country would be only as moralistic as its leaders and wrote in 1798: “Avarice, Ambition and Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
His historical comparisons tempered the judgment. Historians, Widmer observed, often debate the best presidential speeches but rarely worry about the bad ones; many bad addresses have failed. William Henry Harrison’s 1841 inaugural address ran to 8,445 words and, Widmer said, essentially killed him; Harrison died not long after delivering it. James Buchanan, he noted, refused to take a stand on slavery in 1857 and promised to “cheerfully accept” the dreadful Dred Scott decision. Jefferson Davis — “not quite a president,” Widmer observed — promised “no aggression upon others” shortly before the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter, launching the American Civil War.
The 20th century brought more duds, Widmer wrote. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 convention address has often been cited as an embarrassing example of extremist rhetoric attacking international communism as well as the US government. A close reading, however, shows many passages that appear downright calm compared with the constant fusillades of the Trump rallies. Goldwater called for “the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole of Europe reunified and free, trading openly across its borders” and described “Balance, diversity, creative difference – these are the elements of the Republican equation.” Richard Nixon, Widmer noted, had well-known problems with the truth and disliked his enemies, but a casual look at his fall 1970 rally speeches showed nothing like the invective of 2026 — simply cautious statements about balancing the budget, offering tax relief, and restoring law and order.
Widmer’s political case extended beyond rhetoric. He said the United States rarely heard defenses of democracy. He cited a palpable decline in US support for Ukraine and said the previous week had offered refuge to an election-denier, Flávio Bolsonaro, who lost by more than 4 million votes to Lula. He also said American elections had been under constant attack even before they could be held, that the country declared ceasefires that were routinely ignored, and that there was no idea what the plans were for Iran.
He described the rhetoric as the “American Carnage” promised in Trump’s 2017 inaugural. In his argument, it went beyond rhetorical chaos and threatened the irreversible decline of the presidency itself and the great nation it was supposed to represent. He called it a striking setback during a year intended to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and the enlightened ideas enshrined within the founding creed, the Declaration of Independence. Widmer also invoked Alexander Hamilton’s call for “energy in the executive” in Federalist 70, asking whether the energy required to speak for nearly two hours at a rally served the nation or even the Republican party. It could be argued, he wrote, that the Trump brand had become so toxic that it did more harm than good for a candidate to appear at a rally with him. “The wheels are coming off the bandwagon,” he wrote.
Widmer forecast that the next two years may be difficult in Washington, with “a lot of blaming and shaming” if Republicans perform as poorly as expected. But if early indications are accurate, he said, there will be a far greater balance in Washington, “and that is a beginning.” He summed up the two months of speeches: “It will take time to heal from the nonstop airing of grievances over the past two months.” He called the stretch the “Festivus Campaign of 2026.”
The forecast was followed by a contrast with leaders abroad. Widmer said democracy was making a comeback, with surprising victories for progressive campaigns in Brazil and Serbia and elegant speeches delivered in the last few days by Lula and Radomir Sajčić. He said they did not demonize their opponents; instead, they accepted the challenges of building peace and prosperity at home, promoted unity and promised to get to work for the people. In the final weeks of 2026, he wrote, it would be difficult to think of a better way to vindicate the long-ago promises of the Declaration of Independence, that “a better day is possible for a people willing to role up their sleeves and work together.”
The essay is an assessment rather than a new report. Every characterization of the speeches, every comparison with earlier administrations and every forecast for Washington belongs to Widmer. The White House does not post the rally speeches on its website, so the texts must be found elsewhere.