In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, recently adapted for HBO, Philip Roth imaged an alternative American history where Charles Lindbergh, an isolationist and pro-German Nazi sympathizer was elected President of the United States in 1940. In a January 2017 email, Roth compared his fictional depiction of Lindbergh with Donald Trump. According to Roth, “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist.” Trump, the “con artist,” may well be using the Presidency to launch his own plot against America. There is real concern that if he is defeated in the November 2020 election, he could declare the results fraudulent, “fake news,” and try to illegally remain in office.
In his Mount Rushmore July 4th speech, Donald Trump spelled out his reelection strategy. He declared war on America and the United States Constitution. The President, who mismanaged the Coronavirus pandemic, sacrificed American soldiers to his Russian handlers, used religious institutions as political props, sent troops into the street to attack peaceful demonstrators, and described neo-Nazis as good people, venomously accused a fictitious left-wing “totalitarian” conspiracy, “bad, evil people,” and their allies in the Democratic Party of “trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
The speech, delivered to a crowd of Trump supporters that defied Coronavirus social distancing and mask guidelines, was unhinged. Like a wounded animal, Trump stuck out wildly. He was essentially enlisting a fanatical fringe of gun-toting supporters to defend America against unarmed people exercising first amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly. If you think democracy in the United States is not at risk from this group, look at Germany where neo-Nazi networks in elite military units and police forces were recently exposed. These groups have stolen and hidden explosives, weapons, and ammunition in preparation for Day X when they expect to rise up and reclaim their mandate to rule Germany.
The Mount Rushmore speech, essentially repeated the next day in Washington DC, defined Trump as the greatest threat to American values and democratic processes in the history of the United States. It will go down as the worst speech ever delivered by an American President, if democracy and the country survive his Presidency and he is finally escorted out of the White House. It is worth looking at quotes from the speech to understand the depth of Trump’s depravity and his threat to democracy in the United States.
According to Trump, the Black Lives Movement and others challenging statues that honor slavery, racism and the Confederacy are conducting “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” Peaceful protests are “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.” These malefactors expect to succeed because “They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” but Trump’s people “will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.”
Trump, the man who embraces rightwing dictators in Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and Hungary and a bloody monarchy in Saudi Arabia, accuses anyone who challenges his incompetence and nastiness of “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” Anyone who disagrees with his vision of America is promoting “totalitarianism” and attacking “our magnificent liberty>”
Trump promised he would “expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.” He must be reelected because “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” He and only he “will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment which gives us the right to keep and bear arms.”
Somehow this vast leftwing phantom already possesses such great power that “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.” Trump told his supporters that “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 that 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.”
In his fanaticized universe, only Donald Trump can protect the nation from forces determined to “overthrow the American Revolution” and “destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.” How will they do achieve these nefarious deeds? By “tearing down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.”
But Trump, and only Trump, can stop them. Just the day before, under his direction, “federal agents arrested the suspected ringleader of the attack on the statue of the great Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C.” With a new Trump executive order dangerous anti-statue revolutionaries face a minimum of ten years in prison if they “damage or deface federal statues or monuments” including “beautiful Mount Rushmore.” And don’t forget, “Liberal Democrats” are responsible for “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities.”
Trump then announced that “under the authority vested in me as President of the United States, I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Guard of American heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.” However, he left unstated whose statues he was going to place in his park.
Presidential July 4th addresses traditionally celebrate national unity. In 1986, Ronald Reagan warned “All through our history, our Presidents and leaders have spoken of national unity and warned us that the real obstacle to moving forward the boundaries of freedom, the only permanent danger to the hope that is America, comes from within.”
Donald Trump is the danger that Ronald Reagan warned us about.
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