Trump’s sad, strange Fourth of July
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Let’s get an obvious point about President Trump’s Independence Day speech out of the way right at the top. It was a bad speech.
It wasn’t bad in the way most of Donald Trump’s speeches are bad, in that it was not overtly objectionable. It was relatively free of the populist claptrap and barely disguised racism that characterizes so many of the president’s rally addresses. In some ways, it was even anodyne, and certainly not even in the same league as his hideous “American carnage” inaugural address.
Instead, it was just a poorly written speech: a long, cliché-plagued, rambling trip through American history that tried to name-check battles and famous people as applause lines. Imagine “We Didn’t Start the Fire” if Billy Joel had been born in 1776 and his producers told him to take as much time as he needed to finish the song.
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On that level, the “Salute to America” was a flop. Perhaps this was unavoidable, since it was never meant to salute America, but rather to provide the military display Trump has wanted for two years. Like any enforced celebration, it was flat and labored. There were no memorable phrases, no vivid images and no bold proposals — unless you count a promise to NASA stalwart Gene Kranz to plant a U.S. flag on Mars one day. It would have been a challenging speech to deliver even for a better speaker, and Trump, who hates reading from prepared remarks, plodded through it with a strangely detached presence and a certain amount of mushy enunciation, including a weird blip where he referred to the glorious military capture of some airports in colonial America.
On another level, however, the speech was indeed offensive. Not only did it attempt to militarize our most sacred national holiday, but Trump tried to bathe himself in borrowed legitimacy from a military that was forced to march, sing and fly for him.
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There’s nothing wrong with recounting stories of American military heroism and bravery. We even have an entire holiday called Veterans Day devoted to honoring the sacrifices and valor of the men and women who have served our country. And it’s perfectly appropriate to remember that the United States was born out of a revolution, in which both ink and gunpowder were powerful weapons against monarchism and tyranny.
It is another matter entirely, however, to call forward the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs and make them stand there during a cheerless reading of the exploits of each branch of the armed services while a military chorus sings their anthems and their various aircraft roar past — including the narcissistic insistence that Air Force One fly overhead as the president took the stage. (It was also silly, because Air Force One isn’t “Air Force One” unless the president is on board.)
Mining the glories of past military battles while flanked by defense chiefs is the kind of thing Soviet leaders used to do while droning from their reviewing stand in Moscow. It wasn’t patriotic or stirring; it was cringe-inducing. This is probably one of many reasons that former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and former Chief of Staff John Kelly — both retired generals — reportedly squashed this idea whenever it came up.
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The “Salute to America,” in the end, was a miniature military review, held as a partisan exercise for an insecure president who thirsts for legitimacy as a military hero. Our Constitution vests the leadership of the armed forces in an elected civilian for a reason, not least among them so that our republic does not fall prey to a generalissimo or a caudillo.
The speech itself was not the problem. Its content will be forgotten — except, perhaps by students of speechwriting, who might use it as an example of what to avoid in their craft. Everything around it, however, from beginning to end, was an offense to the traditions of our republic and our Constitution.
Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and a former Republican Senate aide. The views expressed here are his alone.
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
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