Yahoo News Trump's Mount Rushmore speech was a grim preview of his re-election strategy
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump’s Independence Day address at Mount Rushmore was not overflowing with the spirit of national unity. He chose to use the national holiday as an opportunity to denounce the political left and the many Americans protesting against racial injustice. The speech was a grim preview of the cynical rhetorical strategy he intends to use to seek re-election.
Related: US under siege from 'far-left fascism', says Trump in Mount Rushmore speech
The general thrust of Trump’s speech was: this country is not threatened by a virus, it is threatened by a protest movement that aims to destroy our culture and history. At a time when Covid-19 cases are growing by the tens of thousands every day, Trump tried to shift the focus to “cancel culture” and the activists who have been trying to tear down controversial monuments:
Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities … One of their political weapons is “cancel culture” – driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism.
Trump doesn’t actually name Black Lives Matter, probably because saying who the protesters are would have made the speech sound explicitly racist. Nor does he talk about why protesters are trying to tear down statues – namely that the statues honor people whose monstrous deeds make them unworthy of honor.
The picture the speech paints of the left is completely deranged. “Totalitarianism” involves using the police and prisons to persecute dissidents; if anything, much of the left is vocally skeptical of the very existence of police and prisons. Furthermore, the “radical left” has almost no power in this country – in Congress, we’ve got the Squad and Bernie Sanders, and that’s about it.
But conservative rhetoric always involves telling those with the most money and power that they are actually being oppressed. (See, for example, Ayn Rand’s ludicrous 1963 lecture America’s Most Persecuted Minority: Big Business.) The picture is always completely topsy-turvy. “Cancel culture” is a completely overblown phenomenon. Yes, people do lose their jobs for political speech – in fact, just last week, a Black Lives Matter supporter was fired from her job at Deloitte after angering Trump fans with a TikTok video. But this is not because the left is in charge, it’s because the left isn’t in charge, and American workers lack the kind of labor protections that would prevent them for being fired for their speech off the job.
Trump is, of course, speaking to white people with all of this. They’re the ones whose country and culture is being supposedly 'lost'
It’s clear what Trump is doing here. His presidency is in crisis. The economy has collapsed, and the administration has proved itself totally incapable of containing the coronavirus, instead promoting irresponsible reopenings that are now causing infection surges. Joe Biden, while uninspiring, is polling well against Trump because nearly everyone is dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Trump cannot pretend that things are going well, because people can see plainly that this is not the case. All he can do is try to whip up the culture war, to get his supporters to see themselves as being in an existential war against a fascist left.
Trump probably thinks protests against monuments are a political lifeline for his presidency. Since he can no longer run on his “beautiful” economy, which is now in the toilet, he needs someone to target – and people pulling down statues of Andrew Jackson seem perfect. Unfortunately for Trump, the public has been broadly supportive of Black Lives Matter, and, as Osita Nwanevu of the New Republic writes, “the right is losing the culture war and losing it decisively”.
Just as Trump himself often seems like a cartoon of an American businessman, Trump’s Fourth of July speech felt like a cartoon of 1950s American rah-rah jingoism, of a kind hard to take seriously today. As he paid tribute to the four white men whose kitschy stone heads are etched into Native American land at Mount Rushmore, Trump reached extremes of hyperbolic Great Man mythmaking:
Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies – all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition. This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore.
Trump went on to detail the accomplishments of these four men, whom he characterized as the greatest people who ever lived. But we know too much today to believe the children’s stories about the founders. Washington’s teeth were not made from wood, they were just taken from those he enslaved, as even the official Mount Vernon website acknowledges. Washington spent three years trying to capture and re-enslave a woman. And we now all know that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly raped and impregnated Sally Hemings.
Conservatives have always tried to wave away these facts as minor foibles. Trump’s speech goes further, however, and doesn’t even mention these men’s crimes, since it would detract from their “intrepid deeds”. But any morally honest person should see that we can’t honor anyone who kept other human beings prisoner and extracted their labor by force. Sorry, if you were a slaver, you don’t get a statue. Likewise if you were a Confederate. Or if you massacred Native people, like Andrew Jackson.
Related: Donald Trump rushed to reopen America – now Covid is closing in on him | Robert Reich
Trump is, of course, speaking to white people with all of this. They’re the ones whose country and culture is being supposedly “lost”; it seems unlikely that many Native Americans will miss an Andrew Jackson statue. Trump is relying on these white people being angry and aggrieved enough to get him re-elected in November. But it’s a desperate tactic. People’s minds are on other things, like the deadly disease killing their grandparents and destroying social life as we know it.
Perhaps Trump can pour enough gasoline on the culture war to keep it raging through November. But he may find that people who are sick, tired and poor are unwilling to go to bat to preserve the statues of long-dead white men who were never so great as they seemed. Perhaps Americans are weary enough, and jaded enough, to see through Trump’s Great American Lie.
Nathan Robinson is a Guardian US columnist and the editor of Current Affairs
