Donald Trump’s planned Fourth of July celebration of himself has so many things wrong with it that it’s actually possible to rank them. So that’s what I’ll do, from least objectionable to most.
Two things I won’t rank, however, because they’re unknown at this point despite some serious hints in the coverage. One is the possibility that Trump is allowing (or even arranging for) a fair amount of graft and corruption in how this event is set up. The other is that there’s a very good chance that the event just isn’t well-planned, leaving a fairly large chance of some serious logistical chaos.
But that leaves plenty that we do know about.
To recap Trump is using the military to mark a civilian holiday; threatens to damage priceless historical monuments in the process; is giving VIP access to campaign donors at the publicly-funded event; and— Jeffrey Lazarus (@jlazarus001) July 3, 2019
is diverting funds from national park maintenance to do it. Right. Gotcha.
I’m not intrinsically upset about the costs of Trump’s extravaganza – which include millions spent out of the federal treasury, plus likely damage to infrastructure in Washington and surrounding areas, plus the very real costs to military personnel and others in having to work on the holiday instead of relaxing and enjoying it. And even the costs to travelers delayed at Washington National.
The costs are upsetting mainly because I think the event is a mistake. I have no problem with the costs of the regular Washington Fourth of July celebration; I generally approve of a fair amount of government spending and nonmonetary costs in the pursuit of celebrating the nation’s holidays, especially this one. Still, it does appear that this is all going to be unusually expensive, and unusually cavalier about inconveniencing both the troops and ordinary citizens.
What’s worse than the costs is turning a nonpartisan celebration of the nation into a partisan event, with the Republican National Committee distributing VIP access to donors. That’s really unfortunate. Washington’s Fourth of July celebration has never been partisan, at least in modern times. And some of Trump’s rhetoric surrounding his event has already included bashing Democrats for supposedly ruining the military before he took office. There’s always a tendency for the incumbent party to hint that it is particularly entitled to the symbols of the nation, but it’s important to keep such tendencies in check. Democracy depends on what’s in many ways a very unnatural willingness to support the government even when it’s filled with one’s political opponents; for that to work at all, the in-party has to at least pretend that it represents everyone. Trump has never accepted that part of his job, and it appears that his Fourth of July will be another example of rejecting it.
What’s worse than the partisanship is the central place of Trump in the celebration. The national holidays of the U.S. simply aren’t about the aggrandizement of the president, and it’s an excellent tradition that presidents typically haven’t taken part at all in the Washington Fourth of July events, much less hijacked them for their own use. It would be bad enough if Trump could be trusted to deliver a bunch of bland patriotic clichés in his planned address to the nation – even if all he did was read the Declaration of Independence – but the record is pretty clear that he isn’t capable of speaking to the nation’s democratic heritage, or in fact giving any kind of speech without his usual bluster and braggadocio. At any rate, the great leader presiding over a militaristic celebration of himself and the nation is what happens in authoritarian regimes, not in democracies.
Which gets to the very worst part of Trump’s Independence Day travesty: putting the military front and center in his vision of the United States. We’ve had altogether too much of this in every context over the last few years, which is pretty much what one would expect from a nation that has been at war for so long. But it’s just wrong for the Fourth of July, which has always been about freedom and democracy and which should be about politics at its best.
Nations that have nothing but military hardware to brag about center their celebrations on tanks and warplanes. The U.S. traditionally celebrates what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness” – both the private happiness of personal enjoyment and the public happiness of a shared political culture and a tradition of civic, including political, participation. Trump doesn’t seem to understand any of that as central to the U.S. That he’s inflicting his politics on the military is dangerous; that he’s inflicting his vision of the U.S. as a military nation above all else is dangerous, too.
For those of us who appreciate the real spirit of the Fourth, the whole thing is just indescribably sad. (This is the column in its entirety.)
The costs are upsetting mainly because I think the event is a mistake. I have no problem with the costs of the regular Washington Fourth of July celebration; I generally approve of a fair amount of government spending and nonmonetary costs in the pursuit of celebrating the nation’s holidays, especially this one. Still, it does appear that this is all going to be unusually expensive, and unusually cavalier about inconveniencing both the troops and ordinary citizens.
What’s worse than the costs is turning a nonpartisan celebration of the nation into a partisan event, with the Republican National Committee distributing VIP access to donors. That’s really unfortunate. Washington’s Fourth of July celebration has never been partisan, at least in modern times. And some of Trump’s rhetoric surrounding his event has already included bashing Democrats for supposedly ruining the military before he took office. There’s always a tendency for the incumbent party to hint that it is particularly entitled to the symbols of the nation, but it’s important to keep such tendencies in check. Democracy depends on what’s in many ways a very unnatural willingness to support the government even when it’s filled with one’s political opponents; for that to work at all, the in-party has to at least pretend that it represents everyone. Trump has never accepted that part of his job, and it appears that his Fourth of July will be another example of rejecting it.
What’s worse than the partisanship is the central place of Trump in the celebration. The national holidays of the U.S. simply aren’t about the aggrandizement of the president, and it’s an excellent tradition that presidents typically haven’t taken part at all in the Washington Fourth of July events, much less hijacked them for their own use. It would be bad enough if Trump could be trusted to deliver a bunch of bland patriotic clichés in his planned address to the nation – even if all he did was read the Declaration of Independence – but the record is pretty clear that he isn’t capable of speaking to the nation’s democratic heritage, or in fact giving any kind of speech without his usual bluster and braggadocio. At any rate, the great leader presiding over a militaristic celebration of himself and the nation is what happens in authoritarian regimes, not in democracies.
Which gets to the very worst part of Trump’s Independence Day travesty: putting the military front and center in his vision of the United States. We’ve had altogether too much of this in every context over the last few years, which is pretty much what one would expect from a nation that has been at war for so long. But it’s just wrong for the Fourth of July, which has always been about freedom and democracy and which should be about politics at its best.
Nations that have nothing but military hardware to brag about center their celebrations on tanks and warplanes. The U.S. traditionally celebrates what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness” – both the private happiness of personal enjoyment and the public happiness of a shared political culture and a tradition of civic, including political, participation. Trump doesn’t seem to understand any of that as central to the U.S. That he’s inflicting his politics on the military is dangerous; that he’s inflicting his vision of the U.S. as a military nation above all else is dangerous, too.
For those of us who appreciate the real spirit of the Fourth, the whole thing is just indescribably sad. (This is the column in its entirety.)
Writing at the Washington Post, in an article titled Trump's hijacking of the Fourth of July just got uglier, Greg Sargent piles on:
The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions — false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.
This is what we will be seeing in one form or another on the Fourth of July, no matter what Trump says in his planned Independence Day speech from the Lincoln Memorial. The very act of taking over the proceedings in the manner he has cooked up itself accomplishes this feat.
New details are emerging about Trump’s plans. The Post reports that the National Park Service will now divert millions of dollars previously earmarked to improve parks across the country to fund Trump’s celebration on the Mall.
Meanwhile, a White House official tells The Post that the plans include a plane from Air Force One’s fleet soaring overhead at precisely the moment that Trump takes the stage. Tanks will take part in the display.
Finally, the White House is handing out tickets to the event to GOP donors and political appointees. Passes are being distributed by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s reelection campaign.
As many critics have pointed out, by politicizing the Fourth of July so nakedly, Trump has inevitably transformed the celebration into a campaign event. It remains to be seen whether he will do so explicitly in his speech, but either way, that conversion has already been implicitly accomplished.
It’s the melding of that fact with the particular display Trump is putting on that makes this so ugly. The showcasing of military might, Trump’s association of himself with it, and the unabashed conversion of a paean to the nation’s founding into a reelection event — what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.
The naked audacity of the usurpation is itself the point. That Democrats and liberals are getting trolled into expressions of outrage over it only reinforces that point to greater effect.
Many have interpreted this moment as yet another sign that Trump does not care a whit about the idea of America. Never-Trumper Tim Miller has a good piece arguing that in multiple ways, Trump rejects the ideas about freedom, equality and self-governance at the core of Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence.
Instead, Miller notes, “it’s all phony branding, no history,” an exercise that “swaps out liberty and self-government for owning the libs and self-aggrandizement.” Read the article here.
Update: It looks like Bernstein's hunch is correct. The dumb stunt isn't being very well planned ("beaches at least one plane ride away from Washington," I love it,) plus apparently there might be thunderstorms in the area tomorrow, haha. First, from Talking Points Memo, written early this morning:
Tanks and politicos are streaming into D.C. for Trump’s July 4 celebration.
But with two days to go, it’s chaos.
Vendors and officials involved with organizing Trump’s “Salute to America” event — set to be held at the Lincoln Memorial — told TPM that it was hastily planned, and as of Tuesday evening, just two days before the event, the military had yet to say where the dozens of tanks that have been ferried into the city will go on July 4.
“If any [military] assets were going to be placed anywhere or traverse city roads or city assets, we would be informed of that and help coordinate that,” Director of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency Chris Rodriguez told TPM Tuesday afternoon. “So if and when that happens, we’ll let you know.”
The Salute to America event is crammed into the otherwise normal schedule of July 4 celebrations in the nation’s capital, which include a concert, parade, and fireworks display every year.
Trump’s Salute to America event is a separate hour devoted to Trumpworld, set to feature a speech from the President, a potential show of tanks and airplanes, and his own fireworks display. But it seems event was put together in a rush.
Phantom Fireworks CEO Bruce Zoldan, whose company is donating fireworks for Trump’s Salute to America event, told TPM that “this should have been planned a lot sooner than it was.”
“Typically, a show like this should be done six months in advance for preparation and planning,” Zoldan said.
Yet, Zoldan said he and Phil Grucci, who runs the family firm Fireworks by Grucci, only started talking about working on a show in February when President Donald Trump tweeted that there would be a “Major fireworks display” on the Fourth.
Grucci, who served as a vendor for Trump’s inauguration, then began reaching out to people in Washington and eventually signed on to run the fireworks show for Trump’s event.
Rodriguez, the D.C. official, told TPM that planning for Salute to America began sometime between April and May.
Officials involved in planning similar events suggested to TPM that the timeframe was drastically shorter than what would typically be expected for an event of this scale.
“This is going to look very militaristic, because the only organization that can pull it together on such short notice is the military,” said Greg Jenkins, a political consultant who ran Bush’s 2004 inaugural.
Another former official involved in planning the 1991 post-Desert Storm military parade in D.C. told TPM that it took nine months to pull the effort together.
“But we did not use tanks in the parade for the very reason the Trump Administration is being questioned about doing so: it does damage to the roads,” the official said.
Other elements of the spectacle have raised eyebrows, particularly the revelation that the White House is doling out exclusive tickets to the event for its political allies via the Republican National Committee as HuffPost reported. This raises questions about whether massive federal government resources are being devoted to a partisan political effort.
A White House spokesperson did not deny to TPM that the RNC had received tickets to the event.
“There is a ticketed area for VIPs, friends and family, members of the military, and veterans,” the spokesperson said.
“It is not a political event,” he added later. “It’s a Salute to America and our independence.”
An RNC official told TPM that it was “standard practice for the RNC to receive a small number of tickets to events just as the DNC did under Democrat Presidents.”
TPM found that the Maryland GOP received tickets for the event, and boasted about receiving them direct from the White House.
“Thanks to our friends at the White House, we at the Maryland GOP have tickets for President Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America” celebration at the Lincoln Memorial,” reads a newsletter sent out by a Maryland GOP Committewoman Nicolee Ambrose asking those interested to RSVP for the event.
Ambrose added in the message: “I am excited to see this new approach for the 4th of July in front of the Lincoln Memorial!”
Neither Ambrose nor the Maryland GOP replied to requests for comment.
In an unusual bit of choreography, the fireworks show associated with Salute to America will run directly before the annual, previously contracted fireworks show from Garden State Fireworks.
The shows are stacked one atop the other: Trump’s event will take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the corresponding fireworks will be launched from behind the monument, on the shores of the Potomac River. Garden State’s show, which was long launched from the reflecting pool, has been moved south of that site, down to West Potomac Park.
Though the fireworks vendors insisted otherwise — and Garden State didn’t respond to an interview request — competition was clearly in the air.
“I’m not putting that [Garden State] show down — it’s one or two shells at a time. Ours are going to be dozens and dozens at a time,” Zoldan, whose company donated fireworks to the Salute to America event, told TPM.
However, what the Garden State show lacks in speed, National Mall Superintendent Jeff Reinbold said in a press conference Friday, it will make up for in girth.
“The ones that will be farther south are the larger ones that you’ve seen in the past,” he said. “Those go up over 1,000 feet.”
Grucci granted that the placement of his Lincoln Memorial show meant that fireworks size would be “slightly restricted.”
(Hours after Trump tweeted his appreciation for the donated fireworks show Tuesday, Phantom Fireworks reportedly received bomb threats at their office in Ohio.)
And from Politico:
NEW: Who exactly is filling the VIP section for POTUS's speech?— Nancy Cook (@nancook) July 3, 2019
WH aides worried about crowd size and media coverage of Trump's 4th of July event, which he is clearly jacked up about...https://t.co/NPloWyXUWE
“They started this too late and everyone has plans already,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “Everyone will be there in spirit, but in reality, people planned their July 4th activities weeks ago.”https://t.co/NPloWyXUWE— Nancy Cook (@nancook) July 3, 2019
"An informal survey of more than a half dozen Trump donors and allies showed that none plan to attend. Several Republicans close to the White House returned POLITICO’s calls from beaches at least one plane ride away from Washington." https://t.co/TjvsOilq1A— Louis Nelson (@louisjnelson) July 3, 2019
Less than 36 hours before the event, White House aides were crafting Trump’s speech while administration and Republican National Committee officials finalized the guest lists.
A White House official declined to explain the system for handing out tickets or the various tiers of VIP access, except to say the reserved seating area – extending from the steps of the memorial to the middle the reflecting pool — will feature veterans, Trump family and friends and special guests. The First Lady, vice president and second lady, and a number of Cabinet officials are expected to attend as well as several senior White House officials — though the aide stressed this, too, was still coming together.
“They are creating this thing from scratch, and I do not know if anyone knows how it will go off,” said another White House aide. “There are questions about the ticket distribution and who will show up. The weather might be bad. Heads are spinning.”
...One Republican close to the White House said he has not heard any chatter among the donor class about attending the speech, even if it meant securing top-notch seats before one of Washington’s most majestic memorials. A Republican political operative called the week of July 4 normally a “dead zone for donors.”
“It’s not a very tough ticket to get,” said another Republican close to the White House. “They’re not going to give it away to anyone off the street, but if you have any juice at all, you can probably get the tickets.”
The White House allowed staffers to enter a lottery to receive up to 10 tickets per person — a sign of the administration’s rush to fill up that space on the mall, said a third White House aide.
Staffers typically can enter lotteries for anywhere from two to four tickets to events such as the Easter Egg Roll, but it is unusual for staffers to get offers for tickets in blocks of 10, the aide added.
Instead military and Pentagon officials spent the last few days privately decrying the use of tankers and military airplanes as part of the president’s speech, fearing it casts the traditionally nonpartisan U.S. military in a political light. (Read the article here.)
And one more thing. Why, exactly, were all those fireworks donated to tomorrow's event?
The two companies donating explosives and labor to President Donald Trump’s VIP-ridden July Fourth Spectacular are giants in the business: Fireworks by Grucci, known for design and production, holds Guinness records for largest aerial fireworks shell and largest fireworks display. And Phantom Fireworks, a supplier, is represented on store shelves in 47 states every Independence Day, according to its website.
Both companies also have a problem: Trump’s tariffs threats. Their donations for the July 4 show came as their industry is fighting to prevent Trump from following through on one threat in particular.
In Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, he’s so far held off on a threatened 25% tariff on a long list of imported Chinese goods that includes fireworks. China supplies the vast majority of fireworks used in the United States.
Phantom Fireworks CEO Bruce Zoldan, who’s donating a half-million dollars of fireworks for the show, visited the White House in late May to argue against the tariffs. He told local Youngstown, Ohio outlet The Vindicator that the meetings came at the White House’s request. He also told the paper he’d personally spoken to the President as well as other “high-level officials.” The meeting came around the same time Trump’s July 4 show was taking shape.
Zoldan told TPM he serves on the board of the American Pyrotechnics Association with Fireworks by Grucci CEO Phil Grucci, who also serves as the group’s treasurer according to its website.
A recent letter dated June 14 from APA executive director Julie L. Heckman asked U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer to remove consumer and professional fireworks from the list of proposed tariff targets.
“These products … are critical not only to the livelihood of the small family businesses who comprise the APA membership, but to millions of families and thousands of municipalities across our great Nation celebrating our Independence Day,” Heckman wrote.
Both Zoldan and Grucci, in phone calls with TPM Tuesday, denied that they hoped for anything in return for their donated fireworks show, which Zoldan estimated would go for $1.2-1.3 million if he and Grucci had done it for a profit.
“There’s absolutely nothing that we have done, or are expecting the administration or White House to do for us,” Zoldan said. “Anybody that knows me knows that I am politically active. Hillary Clinton has been to my house. Joe Biden’s been to my house. Nancy Pelosi’s been to my house. And many Republicans have been to my house. So I do things on both sides of the aisle and I stay friends on both sides of the aisle.”
The June APA letter opposing tariffs, Grucci said, “has absolutely nothing to do with our participation in this event.”
“It was far from our minds and it still is far from our minds,” he added. Implications otherwise, he said, are “kind of insulting.”
Both men identified Gregory Zerzan as the Interior Department lawyer they worked with on the ethics clearance surrounding the large donation. The director of DOI’s Ethics Office and its designated agency ethics official, Scott De La Vega, did not respond to interview requests. (From TPM, this is the entire article.)
Update #2, at 3.30 Central time, 4.30 Eastern, on the 4th of July:
Yes, I'm laughing.The program will start soon, I’m told. pic.twitter.com/rf5Q8yoNc1— Meredith Lee (@meredithllee) July 4, 2019
God has a sense of humor? Mother Nature doesn't like Donald? I think this is hilarious? All of the above:
— Jim Spellman (@jimspellmanTV) July 4, 2019
When it rains, it pours. #TrumpParade pic.twitter.com/PMpY2Z2mnX— Ksenija Pavlovic McAteer (@ksenijapavlovic) July 4, 2019
Update #3 on Friday afternoon: The Republic still stands. Everyone who admires Donald thought yesterday was wonderful; those of us who despise the man thought it was a travesty. I can't imagine that anyone's mind was changed about anything.
For me, as someone who has in the past been paid real money to write speeches for other people (and who occasionally turns a pithy phrase here on the blog...) the speech itself was particularly horrifying. He stayed out of politics, mostly, but still. Who wrote that drivel?
Regarding the funniest part, something about ramparts and airports, even I'm willing to stipulate that Donald really does understand that there weren't any airports around during the Revolutionary War, or not even a few decades later in 1814, which is when the rockets' red glare over Ft. McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner. The best guess in my Twitter feed was that he couldn't read the teleprompter through the dripping wet bullet shield, and simply misspoke. But wait! Now Donald himself says the teleprompter malfunctioned (see video of that here,) which is kind of a head-scratcher: "The teleprompter malfunctioned so I threw in the part about airports for sport?" Can that be what he means? Curious.
Remember who else used to blame wayward teleprompters? Our old friend Sarah Palin, who was known to claim the teleprompter was responsible when the words coming out of her mouth turned out to be incomprehensible hooey. Donald probably doesn't want to go too far down that path.
Finally, Tom Nichols, using the same word Jonathan Bernstein used (above,) calls it Donald's "sad, strange" Fourth of July:
Trump’s sad, strange Fourth of July - New York Daily News https://t.co/VttkZxavx7— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 5, 2019
...and this is his article at the New York Daily News, in its entirety:
It wasn’t bad in the way most of Donald Trump’s speeches are bad, in that it was not overtly objectionable. It was relatively free of the populist claptrap and barely disguised racism that characterizes so many of the president’s rally addresses. In some ways, it was even anodyne, and certainly not even in the same league as his hideous “American carnage” inaugural address.
Instead, it was just a poorly written speech: a long, cliché-plagued, rambling trip through American history that tried to name-check battles and famous people as applause lines. Imagine “We Didn’t Start the Fire” if Billy Joel had been born in 1776 and his producers told him to take as much time as he needed to finish the song.
On that level, the “Salute to America” was a flop. Perhaps this was unavoidable, since it was never meant to salute America, but rather to provide the military display Trump has wanted for two years. Like any enforced celebration, it was flat and labored. There were no memorable phrases, no vivid images and no bold proposals — unless you count a promise to NASA stalwart Gene Kranz to plant a U.S. flag on Mars one day. It would have been a challenging speech to deliver even for a better speaker, and Trump, who hates reading from prepared remarks, plodded through it with a strangely detached presence and a certain amount of mushy enunciation, including a weird blip where he referred to the glorious military capture of some airports in colonial America.
On another level, however, the speech was indeed offensive. Not only did it attempt to militarize our most sacred national holiday, but Trump tried to bathe himself in borrowed legitimacy from a military that was forced to march, sing and fly for him.
There’s nothing wrong with recounting stories of American military heroism and bravery. We even have an entire holiday called Veterans Day devoted to honoring the sacrifices and valor of the men and women who have served our country. And it’s perfectly appropriate to remember that the United States was born out of a revolution, in which both ink and gunpowder were powerful weapons against monarchism and tyranny.
It is another matter entirely, however, to call forward the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs and make them stand there during a cheerless reading of the exploits of each branch of the armed services while a military chorus sings their anthems and their various aircraft roar past — including the narcissistic insistence that Air Force One fly overhead as the president took the stage. (It was also silly, because Air Force One isn’t “Air Force One” unless the president is on board.)
Mining the glories of past military battles while flanked by defense chiefs is the kind of thing Soviet leaders used to do while droning from their reviewing stand in Moscow. It wasn’t patriotic or stirring; it was cringe-inducing. This is probably one of many reasons that former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and former Chief of Staff John Kelly — both retired generals — reportedly squashed this idea whenever it came up.
The “Salute to America,” in the end, was a miniature military review, held as a partisan exercise for an insecure president who thirsts for legitimacy as a military hero. Our Constitution vests the leadership of the armed forces in an elected civilian for a reason, not least among them so that our republic does not fall prey to a generalissimo or a caudillo.
The speech itself was not the problem. Its content will be forgotten — except, perhaps by students of speechwriting, who might use it as an example of what to avoid in their craft. Everything around it, however, from beginning to end, was an offense to the traditions of our republic and our Constitution.
Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and a former Republican Senate aide. The views expressed here are his alone.
Anyway, the Republic still stands. (But I would keep an eye on those Chinese fireworks tariffs.)
Update #4 on Saturday morning. In an article at The Atlantic titled Trump's Recessional, The president's speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for waves of warplanes to cross the sky, former Republican speechwriter David Frum does a deeper dive into why Donald's speech was so wretched:
In the days when I helped people with speeches, our relationship often began like this:
“Can you help me with this speech?”
“Sure. What do you want to say?”
[Awkward pause.]
It’s amazing how seldom there came an answer to the question. The speaker would often have a very clear idea of the attitude he wanted to project, but no urgent message to communicate. He wanted to fill air for 10 or 12 minutes or longer, at the end of which people would regard him as compassionate or strong or whatever other image he had in mind. But how to get from here to there? Well, that’s why he was paying me.
I was jolted back to those days as I reread President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July speech the day after it was delivered.
Trump’s speech was written by people who did not know what they wanted to say. It was a litany of old glories, a shout-out to heroes carefully balanced by race and sex, but with no conscious theme or message. It narrated old triumphs in war and commerce, but without apparent purpose or direction. First this, then that, now a third thing.
Trump wanted pictures and video of his big day: Trump standing in the place where Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, the podium swathed in flags and bunting, bordered by tanks, adoring audience in front, screeching fighter jets overhead … Strong! Proud! The speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for five waves of warplanes to cross the sky.
Yet it’s a strange thing about words. Talk long enough, and sooner or later you will say something. Consciously or not, Trump did say things that evening.
As Trump retold the story of the Pacific War, he said this: “Nobody could beat us. Nobody could come close.” When he paid tribute to the Air Force, he said this: “As President Roosevelt said, the Nazis built a fortress around Europe, ‘but forgot to put a roof on it.’ So we crushed them all from the air.” He added: “No enemy has attacked our people without being met by a roar of thunder, and the awesome might of those who bid farewell to Earth, and soar into the wild blue yonder.” Bringing the story to more recent times: “The Army brought America’s righteous fury down to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.”
Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it. Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. A great country is one that is feared by its enemies, that can inflict more devastating destruction than any other.
How did the United States get so strong and fearsome? Trump revealed some assumptions about that, too. He said of America’s “warriors”:
They guard our birthright with vigilance and fierce devotion to the flag and to our great country. Now we must go forward as a nation with that same unity of purpose. As long as we stay true to our cause, as long as we remember our great history, as long as we never ever stop fighting for a better future, then there will be nothing that America cannot do.
Devotion. Unity. History. Fighting.
But not: Democracy. Justice. Individuality. Peace.
From time to time, one of Trump’s more devout speechwriters will try to insert references to God into the president’s mouth. Those references never sound natural from the least spiritual president in the nation’s history. They were, fascinatingly, all but absent from this speech commemorating the independence of a nation, in the apt phrase of G. K. Chesterton, with the soul of a church. Instead, there was only vainglorious boasting: See our wealth, see our power, see our glorious triumphs over the mounded corpses of our enemies. We will always win, because we always fight.
It was as if the whole ceremony fulfilled Rudyard Kipling’s foreboding of empires end:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe …
Update #4 on Saturday morning. In an article at The Atlantic titled Trump's Recessional, The president's speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for waves of warplanes to cross the sky, former Republican speechwriter David Frum does a deeper dive into why Donald's speech was so wretched:
In the days when I helped people with speeches, our relationship often began like this:
“Can you help me with this speech?”
“Sure. What do you want to say?”
[Awkward pause.]
It’s amazing how seldom there came an answer to the question. The speaker would often have a very clear idea of the attitude he wanted to project, but no urgent message to communicate. He wanted to fill air for 10 or 12 minutes or longer, at the end of which people would regard him as compassionate or strong or whatever other image he had in mind. But how to get from here to there? Well, that’s why he was paying me.
I was jolted back to those days as I reread President Donald Trump’s Fourth of July speech the day after it was delivered.
Trump’s speech was written by people who did not know what they wanted to say. It was a litany of old glories, a shout-out to heroes carefully balanced by race and sex, but with no conscious theme or message. It narrated old triumphs in war and commerce, but without apparent purpose or direction. First this, then that, now a third thing.
Trump wanted pictures and video of his big day: Trump standing in the place where Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, the podium swathed in flags and bunting, bordered by tanks, adoring audience in front, screeching fighter jets overhead … Strong! Proud! The speech existed only to provide a reason why he needed to stand in one place long enough for five waves of warplanes to cross the sky.
Yet it’s a strange thing about words. Talk long enough, and sooner or later you will say something. Consciously or not, Trump did say things that evening.
As Trump retold the story of the Pacific War, he said this: “Nobody could beat us. Nobody could come close.” When he paid tribute to the Air Force, he said this: “As President Roosevelt said, the Nazis built a fortress around Europe, ‘but forgot to put a roof on it.’ So we crushed them all from the air.” He added: “No enemy has attacked our people without being met by a roar of thunder, and the awesome might of those who bid farewell to Earth, and soar into the wild blue yonder.” Bringing the story to more recent times: “The Army brought America’s righteous fury down to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.”
Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it. Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. A great country is one that is feared by its enemies, that can inflict more devastating destruction than any other.
How did the United States get so strong and fearsome? Trump revealed some assumptions about that, too. He said of America’s “warriors”:
They guard our birthright with vigilance and fierce devotion to the flag and to our great country. Now we must go forward as a nation with that same unity of purpose. As long as we stay true to our cause, as long as we remember our great history, as long as we never ever stop fighting for a better future, then there will be nothing that America cannot do.
Devotion. Unity. History. Fighting.
But not: Democracy. Justice. Individuality. Peace.
From time to time, one of Trump’s more devout speechwriters will try to insert references to God into the president’s mouth. Those references never sound natural from the least spiritual president in the nation’s history. They were, fascinatingly, all but absent from this speech commemorating the independence of a nation, in the apt phrase of G. K. Chesterton, with the soul of a church. Instead, there was only vainglorious boasting: See our wealth, see our power, see our glorious triumphs over the mounded corpses of our enemies. We will always win, because we always fight.
It was as if the whole ceremony fulfilled Rudyard Kipling’s foreboding of empires end:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe …
That was how the American president spoke on this 243rd commemoration of a nation that began its independence with a solemn acknowledgement of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” No non-American could watch that spectacle at the Lincoln Memorial and feel that America stood for anything good or right or universal. Power worshipped power, for its own sake.
“We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.” That sentence of self-congratulation toward the end of Trump’s speech was probably lodged in the clipboard memory of some 1980s vintage word processor hauled from the Executive Office Building.
It’s bumpf, a thousand times typed, a thousand times said. And yet this July 4, after all the rodomontade that preceded it, I found myself paying attention to those hackneyed words in a way I never had before. Will Americans always be that people? Are Americans that people now?
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord! (This is the article in its entirety.)
By-the-way, do you know what "bumpf" is? How about "rodomontade"? Me neither but I like to learn new words, so I looked them up:
Bumpf: Useless printed instructions and manuals. Originated in England during World War II when English soldiers were overwhelmed with unnecessary printed materials and used them as they would toilet tissue or "bum fodder". (From UrbanDictionary.com)
Rodomontade: Noun; vainglorious boasting or bragging; pretentious, blustering talk. (From Dictionary.com)
Rodomontade: Noun; vainglorious boasting or bragging; pretentious, blustering talk. (From Dictionary.com)
If you want more evidence of how wretchedly insufferable and narcissistic Donald really is, ponder this tweet, sent out this morning:
Our Country is the envy of the World. Thank you, Mr. President! https://t.co/2h8mvu16YX— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2019
Is that really how a strong, smart, emotionally and physically healthy person talks? About himself? I promise I'm not being snarky when I say that I'm beginning to wonder of some kind of age-related mental decline has started to set in.
No comments:
Post a Comment