Trump at Mount Rushmore

I believe that a great speech can make a difference. And if I am any judge, Trump’s speech before Mt. Rushmore was a great one, that may be historic.

The ultimate showman, he chose his backdrop perfectly.

The key to a great speech is not at all complicated. A great speech is a speech that states some obvious truth that nobody has been saying, and states it plainly. It is that simple, and it is exceedingly rare. A classic example is Reagan referring to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire.” Of course it was, and nobody was supposed to say so. Or when, in 1987, Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall, and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Everyone was shocked at his “extremism”; you were not supposed to say such obvious things.

Two years later, the wall was torn down.

The most famous sentence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech was similarly a simple truth that no one was speaking: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” Nobody was saying it, yet no sane man could disagree.

The true power of Churchill’s great wartime speeches was that he never sugarcoated anything, and he never told a lie. He always spoke the plain truth.

“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.”

But the critical thing is that he called out evil by its name. So did Reagan.

This is what Trump did at Mount Rushmore.

Scott Adams did not like the speech. “The least unifying speech I’ve ever seen on my whole (deleted) life.” The Democrats and the mainstream media have targeted it as “dark” and “divisive.” When I Google "Trump Mount Rushmore speech" this morning, the first results I get are "The 28 most outrageous lines from Trump's Mount Rushmore Speech" (CNN); "Donald Trump Tries to Drag America Backward" (CNN); "Trump Pushes Racial Division at Mount Rushmore Speech" (Time); "Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message" (NYTimes).

But this is not a time or a place for reconciliation. Churchill did not speak of reconciliation after Dunkirk; Reagan did not speak of reconciliation with the Soviet Union over the Berlin Wall. One cannot reconcile good and evil. If this is divisive, that divisiveness was introduced by the mobs pulling down the statues of their fellow citizens’ heroes, refusing to stand for the national anthem, declaring the entire system racist and saying it must be torn down, by violence if necessary. It is pure comic absurdity then to term Trump “divisive.”

Trump said the mobs tearing down statues were “bad, evil people.” That is calling a spade a spade. He referred to the current far left as “fascism.” He called their agenda a “cultural revolution.” He said that their intent was to “destroy this civilization.” He referred to “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” “This is the very definition of totalitarianism.” “Every child of every colour, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of God…” “We must demand that our children again be taught … our founding ideals…not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.”

These are indeed strong words. Which is to say, it was a strong speech. They are all true, obviously true, and nobody was supposed to say them. By saying them, Trump may have opened the dam of repression.

Adams thought the President seemed “low energy,” and looked tired. I think, again, he is exactly wrong. Trump struck just the right tone. It was a stark contrast to the tone that so annoyed me in the recent Canadian Conservative leadership debate, in which candidates kept mouthing meaningless platitudes with a tone of false urgency. If you are going to tell the truth, and it is important, you speak instead in calm, measured, authoritative tones. No emotional flourishes. Churchill would have done so; and this is what Trump did.

The one essential act to defeat evil is to call it out to its face. This is why, in an exorcism, one must get the demon to admit his presence and say his name. Solzhenitsyn expressed this truth when he said that, if at any time anyone in the old Soviet Union had awakened one day determined to tell the truth, the entire structure might have collapsed by nightfall.

We shall see. If I am right, things are going to swiftly go against the social justice mobs from this point.