Fourth of July now Trump’s vanity project
On this July 4, Donald Trump promises something different on the National Mall: Tanks, planes, generals and himself.
What has long been a non-partisan celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is now a veneration of the commander-in-chief and his props. For our reality television showman, a military display and a presidential address on the country’s national holiday are perfect.
Trump has coveted this vanity pageant since he watched Bastille Day in Paris two years ago. So now, against all precedent, there will be jet fighters, Sherman tanks, battle hymns and a command performance of the uniformed, gold-braided and bemedalled Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, as Trump modestly puts it, “Your favourite president, me.”
He will speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the March on Washington in 1963. Expect Trump to contrive to stand on the same spot (it’s marked) and claim a crowd bigger than the 250,000 who heard King declare, “I have a dream.” It was an imperishable moment, which Trump wants to match.
Thursday will be Trump’s America in a splashy show of sound and might. That this president could stand before the enthroned Abraham Lincoln — and in the shadow of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, all recalled in marble nearby — is the great practical joke of our time.
To think that Trump occupies the office they held is to weep for Winston Churchill’s “Great Republic.” In Churchill’s time, America won the Second World War, founded the international architecture of the postwar era and created the Marshall Plan. It trumpeted collective security, free trade and multilateralism of the new international order.
Now it comes to this: An impostor prowling the metaphoric ruins of the imperial capital, swaggering like a tin-horn Mussolini. In his rhetorical hamper he unpacks a purée of platitudes and a salad of superlatives.
This is America’s bad moment. Trump’s America basks in low unemployment and strong markets, enjoying the sugar high of tax cuts while incurring generational debt. Meanwhile, the country is fraying.
Parents pay their children’s way into college while gangs continue to kill on the streets of Chicago. The president is repeatedly accused of sexual assault. Once, lesser sexual impropriety would undo the president, reflecting a lively Puritanism; now the pendulum has swung so far the allegations evoke a sigh and a shrug.
Trump jokes publicly with Vladimir Putin over his manifest efforts to influence the 2016 election. This is only one example of the erosion of American democracy.
States gerrymander congressional districts, ensuring one-party rule, upheld by a U.S. Supreme Court whose conservative majority includes two judges accused of sexual misconduct. Meanwhile, states use voter suppression laws to depress minority turnout.
Money buys ambassadorships, access and influence. Nothing new there, but it is more pronounced in an administration of opportunists. This is what you attract when winning the White House costs $1 billion.
If America’s democracy is in danger, so is its decency. Anti-Semitism is rising, as is racism, to alarming levels, neither of which bothers Trump.
Vulgarity reigns. It is not just a president who uses expletives from public platforms, as if he were speaking to his valet. Profanity in the national conversation grows, the default position of a people who have become angry, ignorant and inarticulate.
As income disparity widens, regional divisions appear. Chief executives make hundreds of times more than workers on the factory floor, and no one cares about that, either. Republicans assault Obamacare, while the epidemic of opioids rages, a public health crisis threatening to lower the average lifespan.
The United States remains the world’s greatest country, a seat of excellence, ingenuity and generosity, no more so than on this rock-bound island out in the Atlantic. This country is a gift to civilization that has always defied the declinists and defeatists in times of anxiety.
It will again, eventually, but not soon enough.