Trump went up to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday, July 3rd, for a fireworks show, as well as a speech.
The speech wound up being one of the most divisive speeches that he has ever given, and that is saying something. After all, this man announced his candidacy for the White House in the summer of 2015 with a speech in which he accused Mexicans in the United States of being criminals and rapists. Many of his speeches during the 2016 campaign sounded divisive and were misleading and riddled with lies. His Inaugural Address was blasted for being divisive and setting a very narrow, nationalistic agenda for the country that he was now going to lead. In another speech, he literally got laughed at before the entire United Nations assembly. And many of the speeches that he has delivered during those pathetic political rallies of his are also highly incendiary and filled with his trademark lies and deliberate deceptions.
Yet somehow, a president who has never stopped or even slowed in his efforts to produce still new lows for the nation throughout his entire presidency now produced his worst speech ever, right at a time when Americans seem more divided than ever, and desperately in need of some kind of real leadership. Leadership that this notoriously shallow and self-serving con artist simply does not have. And the country is worse off for it, much like it has been worse off for seeing this pathetic excuse for a human being rise to the White House to begin with. Trump delivered a speech that essentially amounted to a call for cultural wars. He spoke about something that he called “new far-left fascism” that threatened to destroy the nation, according to him. He railed against Antifa, a non-existent organization that he wants to officially declare a terrorist group. He advocated a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for anyone found guilty of defacing statues.
Yes, once again, Trump is speaking the language of division, and stoking the hatred – and there is a considerable amount of that – among his core base. They are fearful, and they hate being tested, being challenged. They absolutely hate having their prejudices challenged, and hate even more being called out so publicly for their hatred, for those prejudices. It is kind of like if they had their dirty laundry aired for all of the world to see. So Trump falls back on the standby position of all similar tyrants, who want to impose their authoritarian way, which is the old way. He assures people that this is the only way, because we never have really tried any other way, don’t know anything different, and so have no real experience with a society working differently than the way that our present society works. He wants to keep it this way. In fact, he wants to turn back the clock, to go back to some kind of mythical greatness that he saw and felt back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, during America’s golden age. We should know, of course, that we cannot go backwards, cannot turn back the clock. But Trump and his supporters plug their ears and refuse to hear that. They allow themselves the conceit of believing that they can achieve the impossible, and go back in time. They are suspect of any kind of progress that this country has made, aside from strictly economic progress. Any kinds of social changes are suspect in their eyes.
And so, during his speech on the Fourth of July, Trump did not so much address the entire nation, did not really resemble the “president for all Americans” that he promised to be on the night when he won the 2016 election. Instead, predictably and true to form for the Trump we have grown used to seeing and hearing for the past three and a half years now, Trump fell back to his hatred, and to stoking the hatred and feat of his supporters. Fear of changes, fear of the unknown. Frankly, fear of serious national progress.
Trump is and always has been a divider, not a unifying presence. On the national holiday, Trump did not even bother pretending to bring the country together, but instead, got busy predictably pulling it apart at the seams. The polls have been unkind to him, he recently admitted that Joe Biden might be the next president, and so he is lashing out. Protecting himself, and willing to bring the nation down with him. To tear it apart. Perhaps he thinks that he can incite some kind of civil war. Or perhaps he believes that this kind of fear-mongering will work again, to be just enough to get him another term, so that he can continue his work of enriching himself and his business interests through the White House, and to continue the work of dividing a once great and stable nation that often now feels neither great nor stable.
No, Trump is not solely responsible for all of the country’s problems, as so many self-identified liberals and Democrats seem to feel. Many of the problems that we are going through now have existed for many years, if not decades. But Trump’s specialty has proven to be exploiting those problems for his own personal gain. He is nothing if not a skilled, exceptionally talented opportunist. Nobody ever said that he was not good at serving his own best interests, even if it comes at the expense of the well-being of the country that he is supposed to be the leader of. Indeed, Trump has undeniably proven very effective at blindly pursuing his own narrow self-interests, and this has diminished this country in a very real sense. Frankly, it has been hard to celebrate any kind of positive feeling for the future of this country since Trump took over, specifically. But this Fourth of July felt particularly dark and menacing, and that had everything to do with Trump. Because indeed, the country has diminished before the eyes of a watching world, and Trump has been very proud of this work. He has hastened our decline like no other president in American history.
The question, though, is whether or not this country still is capable of rising up enough to show that it is bigger than this small man. Can the country unite enough to finally shed itself of the dark shadow that Donald Trump has cast over it? Or will it allow Trump to continue to tear at the fabric of the nation, until it is ripped apart beyond all repair? He is the salt that makes old wounds howl in protest, the insult to our injuries. It is time to find out if we are strong enough, united enough, to recognize that and throw him out, once and for all, or if he truly is able to continue to suck the life out of this country, like a blood-sucking leech that grows fatter and more offensive at the expense of the people of this nation.
Frankly, it is not a given that we will finally be rid of him in one year’s time. His followers already are boldly asking how we as a country can rely on a better future without him. But we must recognize that, in fact, we could hardly do worse by closing this dark chapter in our history, and closing the book on Trump being the sitting president, and thus, the literal voice and face of the “ugly American.”
Below are a couple of links to articles covering Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which got me onto this topic to begin with.
The Reviews Are In: Trump’s Mount Rushmore Address Was His WORST Speech as President by Jason Miciak, July 3, 2020
https://www.politicalflare.com/2020/07/the-reviews-are-in-trumps-mount-rushmore-address-was-his-worst-speech-as-president/?fbclid=IwAR3ltG1rneDkmhJhs5ll9mrl1M8lVc9Iu16mluxeTix83zKG7H3mku-gATQ
Trump casts himself as chief defender of American history in divisive speech at Rushmore by Rashaan Ayesh, July 4, 2020:
https://www.axios.com/trump-casts-himself-as-chief-defender-of-american-history-rushmore-65d3d482-9eba-4b0c-9798-f99feeddef20.html?utm_campaign=organic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR22lJ-5nX1hURSQSUhn-CQCnnZOXkpVtrOOyiqJk7ADEKmZbiwjH6XFCtw
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