Something remarkable happened over the weekend after President Trump gave his address at Mount Rushmore. As was to be expected, the mainstream media deplored the speech as “dark and divisive,” but it was also immediately effective. Here’s how.
In order to absurdly portray Trump’s speech as a racist appeal to disaffected white voters, the media and the Democrats had to pretend that Trump was only defending confederate statues when he spoke about our nation’s monuments.
Now, this is obviously an outright and outrageous lie, but in this case the perfidy of fake fact outfits like the New York Times and CNN has a bright silver lining. Over the past two weeks conversation had strayed from confederate statues, as most conservatives knew would happen to the Founding Fathers. It wasn’t just mobs. In Boston and New York City, local governments moved to remove statues of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson respectively. That seems to be over, at least for now.
Either as a result of polling or maybe a passing moment of actual clarity, Democrats like Joe Biden have come to the sane realization that tearing down statues of the Founding Fathers doesn’t play all that well, especially on 4th of July weekend. So now the cancel culture car has been thrown in reverse, now they will pretend that nobody ever supported removing anything but confederate statues.
Now it is certainly frustrating to watch the media memory hole the past two weeks and pretend statues of the Founding Fathers were never the issue, but there isn’t much to be done about it. We can point it out, but there is absolutely no accountability in their world, no consequences for getting things wrong time and time and time again, instead they give each other awards for flawed, fact-challenged scribbling.
But the message of Trump’s speech Friday night is the central message of his presidency and his entire political raison d’etre. His unapologetic style forces the left to make hard and fast choices, to draw bright lines. A Mitt Romney type Republican would more likely speak in a balanced way about the difficulties of America’s past, he would make the other side’s argument for them and seek compromise. On the founders, Trump offered no compromise, and that is why for now he was won that argument completely.
In the hazy pre-pandemic world of the 2016 election, Trump and his supporters were often mocked with the line “but he fights.” Friday night in South Dakota Trump fought not only for the legacy of the Founding Fathers, but for all the great Americans, no matter gender, race, or religion, who helped create an America that he and many of us believe is the greatest nation on earth.
Biden supporters have been in a scramble to distance their candidate from those speaking out against Jefferson and Lincoln statues, suddenly they are being presented as a small sect of leftists, not as representative at all of the Democratic Party.
Leftist activist Bill Kristol went so far as to suggest that if the country did re-elect Trump the destruction of monuments would continue. It’s like an extortion scheme, “those are some nice statues you got there, be a shame if something happened to them, maybe you better vote for Biden.”
Defending the images of America’s heroes and founders should not be a controversial opinion and Donald Trump made that clear. He made it so clear, in fact, that most of the media simply ignored that this is what he was saying and invented some rant about the confederacy instead.
The message to Trump and his supporters is to just keep punching away. Ignore irrelevant accusations of divisiveness; forget about calls for Trump to unify the country. The position of many Democrats and those in their media machine is that refusing to buckle to and compromise with the absurd anti-American ramblings of the left is racism. It’s nonsense. The president knows it, his supporters know it. And as of Friday night, the Joe Biden for President campaign and the more mainstream elements of the party, such as they still exist, know it too. The Founding Father’s statues have been saved. At least for now.
