Like the characters in a certain 1966 spaghetti Western, there was good, bad, and ugly in President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address and his promise of a “golden age” ahead.

“We will forge a society that is color-blind and merit based,” the 47th president declared and that is a laudable objective. But has Trump himself adhered to that standard in his cabinet nominees? President George Washington had near-demigods (and future Broadway musical fare) in Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state and Alexander Hamilton as treasury secretary. President Abraham Lincoln had giants William Seward at state, Salmon P. Chase at treasury (who went on to become chief justice) and Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war. Can President Trump boast of any parallels? The aspiration, nevertheless, is praiseworthy.

Trump also pledged “fair, equal, and impartial justice under the Constitution and the rule of law.” This, at least in theory, is commendable as well. Attorney General Robert Jackson acknowledged over 80 years ago that with such a broad assortment of federal crimes on the books, law enforcement was tempted to degenerate from spotting a crime and searching for the culprit into finding political opponents and then scouring the books to pin offenses on them.

In that spirit — and to avoid any further self-serving rewrites of troubling events in his own past like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol for which the president has already unwisely showered pardons indiscriminately — President Trump should consider one more executive order. He should henceforth prohibit any White House communications with the U.S. Department of Justice except through the White House Counsel to the U.S. Attorney General and never regarding a pending investigation or prosecution. Justice, like Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion.

Still, Trump badly stumbled in celebrating the government as the answer to inflation, a throwback to President Richard Nixon’s disastrous venture into wage and price controls. “I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat … inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices,” Trump pledged. Is that any different in principle than former Vice President Kamala Harris’ promise to ban corporate price gouging in the food and grocery industries? How did all those invited tech giants in attendance hold back their self-satisfied smirks (well, in the case of Elon Musk, hold back bigger smirks)?

Trump’s salute to “manifest destiny” was a summons to war, or something close to it, at the southern border. The unjust and unconstitutional Mexican-American War was fought under just such a banner. Union General and later President Ulysses S. Grant recounted, “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

Nothing in the inaugural address departed much from Trump’s campaign well-worn promises, slogans, or style. And that is, alas, something of a mixed bag as well. Was the first day in office not the ideal moment to be gracious, to seek to unite all Americans, to find common ground? Or how about simply sticking to the truth?

Yet the second-term president could not avoid his customary high-drama, low-accuracy script including how tariffs are paid by foreign countries (nope, consumers get the final bill) or how China operates the Panama Canal (the government of Panama continues to have their chore) or how he will reverse the “Green New Deal” which should prove a challenge given the U.S. didn’t actually adopt that particular nonbinding resolution.

It’s one thing to offer these chestnuts as campaign rallies, it’s quite another to repeat them in the U.S. Capitol where most everyone in attendance at this peaceful transfer of power from members of Congress to (hopefully) cabinet nominees knows they are hokum.

Points for showmanship (signing promised executive actions before a crowd of supporters at Capitol One Arena later in the afternoon continued the TV-friendly trend) but failing grades for actual statesmanship. Perhaps in the coming days, President Trump will reflect that whom the Gods would destroy, they first crown with great power and fill with hubris.