The words of most inaugurals would sound insane if spoken quietly, indoors; and they sometimes sound that way when carried on the wind via loudspeakers and vast JumboTron TV screens. These quadrennial speeches are as close as America comes to the rhetoric heard more than 70 years ago in Red Square, the Piazza Venezia in Rome and the Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nuremberg. Or, to put it in the more kindly words of Peggy Noonan, the columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, they are “a golden trumpet that a president gets to blow at most twice in his life”.