Here’s Trump’s pre-Independence Day speech yesterday, in front of the huge iconic carvings of four of his presidential predecessors on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pfGOBUsHwU. (Sorry about the adverts; but you should be able to be able to skip them.) Apparently he’s hoping to have his own mug added to theirs eventually: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SWhfmwonUK8). As to that, of course we’ll have to wait and see. We may think it unlikely; but remember that there are virtually no limits to what in America private wealth can achieve. I’m sure that Elon Musk would donate a few million bucks.

In the meantime the speech is worth studying closely: partly for the egregious errors and lies that lie within it, but much more for what it says about Trump’s vaunting ambition, and the picture he paints of the essential American ‘culture’ that he sees as lying at the root of the US’s ‘greatness’ under him. In the first place, of course, that culture is ‘exceptional’. In fact this is one of the best utterances of the decades-old doctrine or myth of ‘American Exceptionalism’ that I’ve ever come across. It’s also heroic; ‘white’ and masculine, and so implicitly racist and sexist; individualist; very capitalist, but also God-fearing (the Judaeo-Christian God, of course); even ‘miraculous’; and the agency of every good that has ever been done by any nation throughout the world. It’s also bound to triumph over all the evil challenges that are currently besetting America; the most fearsome of which is ‘communism’, which I was surprised to see raising its hoary head again so long after McCarthy, and America’s more recent victory (hers alone, according to Trump) over the Soviets in the Cold War.

But American culture is also being undermined by those who are presently doubting America’s moral greatness, by emphasising the ‘merely human’ mistakes she has made along the way, like slavery and the genocide of the native Americans – far too much attention to which is being given by, for example, academic historians and the Smithsonian Institute, than is helpful for the sustenance of the proper sense of patriotism that is necessary to project what Trump promises to be America’s ‘Golden Age’, into the future. That’s once all the immigrants – the main carriers of communism and every other evil – have been forcibly turned away, and domestic communists – amongst whom he includes ‘libtards’, social democrats and even the entire ‘Dumocratic’ Party – have been exiled. Yes, he really means this.

If a granite likeness of Trump’s head does emerge on Mount Rushmore in the future, it will be a sign that this is the route that America has chosen to take after today. Future historians will study yesterday’s speech as a foundational document for the (quasi-) fascism that may follow it: a rather longer, and less coherent, Gettysburg Address for our times.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that there is still hope – as there usually is where the US is concerned. See my last Post.