My salute to Donald Trump, flaws and all
WATCHING the ‘Salute to America 250’ festivities on this year’s Fourth of July holiday reminded me how much I love the United States for reasons too numerous to list here. Held on the National Mall in Washington DC, the ‘Salute’ was the signature national celebration held to mark America’s 250th birthday in the so-called Semiquincentennial. It featured some highly spirited musical performances by mostly military personnel, including a very respectable rendition of Village People’s YMCA by a naval officer in dress whites, a full symphony orchestra, some very talented young servicewomen singing contemporary pop songs, and a tenor (not military) doing considerable justice to Puccini’s magnificent aria Nessun Dorma from his final opera, Turandot. Maybe it was the brandy, but I even found myself oddly moved by an 83-year-old Lee Greenwood singing his own composition ‘God Bless the USA’, which I’ve never appreciated musically but whose lyrics expressing pride in being American, love of family, and honoring those brave men and women who have died defending freedom are more pertinent today than ever.
But the highlight of the evening was – it will come as no surprise to learn – the 40-minute speech given by the one and only President Donald J Trump, barely 24 hours after he delivered a similar speech in front of majestic Mount Rushmore to kick off the United States’ 250th Independence Day celebrations, in which he pledged that ‘the torch of America’s liberty will never go out’, an inspiring speech covered here in these pages. What a treat it was for an unsophisticated chap like me to hear a US president actually praising America and its extraordinary contributions to human civilisation! After years of doom and gloom with mega-rich celebrities trashing the nation while travelling abroad – who can forget Barack Obama’s excruciating ‘apology tour’ during his first year in office? – Trump’s positive remarks about this country’s past, present, and future must have acted as a tonic for millions of patriotic Americans hesitant to express their love of country. I know they did for me.
Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects have been quick to criticise both speeches for being too political, one going so far as to blaming him for ruining the July 4 celebration in Washington DC. To be sure, they would have found reasons to criticise even if he’d made no political references whatsoever. Such is the nature of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a seemingly incurable malady that deprives a sufferer of reason and the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and that shows no signs of going away any time soon.
It is of course entirely possible that Trump’s critics have a point. They often do on minor issues, while studiously avoiding the larger picture, believing that the millions like me who voted for him did so because they thought him a paragon of good taste and moral rectitude. Would his words about American greatness and exceptionalism have been more effective had he left out references to specific legislation and the admittedly unwarranted lawfare that has been waged against him? I think the answer is yes, his words would have been more effective had he spoken more generally about what makes this extraordinary country so distinctive and pre-eminent in the history of the world. However, after hearing Trump call out the evils of ‘Cancel Culture’ and the very real threat of totalitarianism and ‘far-left fascism . . . in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms’, threats to what he called ‘our magnificent liberty’, all is forgiven by at least one patriotic American.
But as I’ve said before in these pages, Trump is not all we’ve got, he’s what we’ve got. Besides, we’re at a point in this nation’s history when such quibbling seems a luxury. Without him this nation would have been lost with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. At present, there is no one else. Four years of Biden came close to destroying America, having caused possibly irreparable harm to the country. We simply cannot let this happen again.
Trump has already achieved much in his second term. But the forces of darkness – and readers of TCW know whereof I speak – remain in place and are just biding their time. The midterms are looming large on the horizon, and God only knows what will happen in 2028. Those of us who love this country and want to save it from those who seek to destroy it must not ignore the fact that the United States, Trump notwithstanding, continues to face the same existential crisis it has faced since, arguably, the 1960s.
Am I being alarmist in saying this? It’s certainly in my nature to be so. Anticipating the bailiff’s knock on the door is possibly a legacy of my Irish father. But we must not forget that much of the toxic madness that has befouled the developed world in recent decades – political correctness, DEI, anti-men and anti-family feminism, racialised identity politics, Black Lives Matter, the madness of gender ideology, and that latest nation-destroying blight known as wokeism, have been gestated at American universities. The men and women responsible for birthing this madness are still flourishing at all levels of American society. They continue to occupy positions of considerable power and influence.
Despite the emergence of the new rightward-leaning media, and Trump’s efforts to expose them, such people, and their sycophantic anchorites, retain their long-enjoyed and almost overwhelming monopoly over American culture, controlling the means whereby narratives are constructed, consumed, distributed, circulated and exchanged, to use words that would have sat well with Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. They are united by two things: hatred of Trump and, increasingly, hatred of America.
Indeed, it needs to be emphasised that, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, patriotism and love of country can no longer be taken for granted among my fellow Americans. I must also stress that, among a certain class of people, invariably on the left, it has become almost fashionable to denigrate the United States and express shame for being American, mocking those among their fellow citizens who stand for the national anthem, place their right hands on their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, and hang American flags proudly outside their homes, the preponderance of the latter making some leftward-leaning elites feel unsafe.
Classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson has compared Donald Trump to tragic heroes like ‘the angry and old but still fearsome Ajax’ from the Iliad. He also draws parallels between the deeply flawed Trump and the flawed heroes such as Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) in the iconic John Ford Western The Searchers, not to mention a long list of other films from Shane to High Noon. Being a lifelong aficionado of the Western, I hesitated to buy into this comparison when I first came across it in 2018, but am now convinced that Hanson has a point.
At this stage in his life and career, Trump cannot really be considered a tragic figure. He is, to be sure, a flawed individual, in keeping with those archetypes noted by Hanson. But his strengths far outweigh his weaknesses. Maybe the real tragedy associated with Trump is that so many of his detractors choose to ignore or are unable to see what he has done for the country and the world. Few if any will thank him for ridding Iran of nuclear weapons, or for securing the borders, lowering crime and inflation, attracting investment and jobs to the US, protecting the American labour force through tariffs, and raising the morale of the military, to name but a few of his achievements; but they will benefit from the results.
Allow me to finish by citing the great Kathy Gyngell, my friend and editor, when she said that America’s ‘achievements and freedom hang in the balance . . . Trump has ridden to the rescue, but if the revolutionaries and anti-Trumpists get their way . . .’ a quarter-century quest for liberty will have been wasted.
Trump is not a perfect vessel, but without him and for what he stands the West is lost. We had better realise that before it’s too late.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-salute-to-donald-trump-flaws-and-all/
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