July 4, 2020: Trump Celebrates at Mt. Rushmore

 

7/4/20: Happy birthday, America! You still look sexy at 244! True, your boyfriend, is an oaf, with authoritarian instincts. 

Still, election in November!

 

____________________ 

“Their goal is not a better America. Their goal is to end America.” 

President Trump

____________________

  

Speaking of President Trump, he gave a big speech last night in front of a crowd at Mt. Rushmore. It was a pro-Trump crowd. That meant almost no one wore masks or made any attempt to social distance. 

First, the audience was treated to video of Trump bragging about what once had been. Just short weeks ago, we were doing “better than any country had ever done in history,” he said on film. “Film Donald” touted his own greatness while In-the-Flesh Donald gazed at “Film Donald” with rapt admiration. The coronavirus had sent the economy into a tailspin. Now, said “Film Donald,” we were “close to fighting our way out of it.” “We have a country that’s really making a comeback.” 

In-the-Flesh Donald smiled broadly as he watched himself brag about himself. “We had the best unemployment numbers, we had the best employment numbers, we had the best stock market numbers that we ever had, we were doing better than any country had ever done in history.”

 

Other than that, Trump’s speech was “American Carnage Revisited.” The radical left, he said, was a “growing danger,” killing off many of our bronze statues. R.I.P.: Don Juan de Oñate. No one really cared who you were, even when your statute stood there on that pedestal in Albuquerque for decades.   

Trump’s political foes didn’t just want to expand Obamacare, raise the minimum wage, and allow LGBTQ individuals to have jobs. They didn’t just believe cops should stop kneeling on people’s necks until breathing stopped. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump glowered. “Their goal is not a better America. Their goal is to end America,” he cautioned. 

What about all those people marching for justice? Who were they? Trump wanted his almost entirely-white audience to know, and to know he would defeat them. “We will not be terrorized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” the President of the United States promised, denigrating a large percentage of the citizens he was elected to serve. “It will not happen.”

 

The people protesting the death of George Floyd and other African Americans, weren’t interested in justice, he said. They formed “angry mobs.” They wanted to “deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.” Trump foes wanted to “attack our liberty, our magnificent liberty,” he told fans. They “must be stopped.” 

They “will be stopped very quickly,” he promised. 

The president said it was his job (with the aid of his followers) to “protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.” 

Who were the enemies – besides protesters? They were legion. “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” Trump blamed liberal Democrats who run most of our cities, for “the violent mayhem we have seen.” Protesters weren’t mad because police kept killing black people for little or no reason. Trump claimed that the mayhem was “the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.” 

If I caught his meaning right, he was going to save American culture from…cultural institutions. 

In any case, we had to save the children from America’s teachers! “Our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains,” the president said. He was stirring his base, as only an individual with hateful instincts can stir a base. His opponents, that large part of the U.S. population who felt we could do better in the battle against racism, were dangerous radicals. Their “view of American history is a web of lies,” Trump shouted. 

He turned to defending the four men whose stone visages appeared behind him on the mountain. As a former history teacher, I could do the same. Since I know the history, I could do it better, because when it comes to history, our current president is a dolt. 

It’s not a “web of lies” to point out that a pronounced vein of hypocrisy ran through the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Trump called him “an architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a scholar, a founder of one of the world’s great universities, and an ardent defender of liberty.” 

In my class, I used to have students memorize the key 84-word passage that is the soul of the Declaration of Independence. I wanted them to answer six questions about the ideals set forth therein. Those ideals are at the heart of what makes this nation unique. Still, it’s not a “lie” to point out that Jefferson had time to dabble in architecture because slaves performed the drudgery at Monticello. Jefferson could study and invent because others tilled his fields without pay. He was “an ardent defender of liberty,” but only for some Americans. He fathered several children by one of his slaves and could have sold them, had he so desired. 

Ah, but the ideals laid down in the Declaration, those are truly great; and the battle since has been to live up to them. 

Not down, as under Donald J. Trump. 

 

There’s your fascism, right there. 

I doubt our current president knows much about any of the four figures immortalized in Mt. Rushmore granite. I could tell him that George Washington was an admirable leader in almost all respects. Unlike Trump, our first chief executive lived by a code of conduct that stressed honor, duty, and respect for others. 

I could also explain to Mr. Trump (and his fans) that when British warships sailed up the Potomac River in 1781, a number of General Washington’s slaves grabbed their personal belongings and rushed to the waterside, to be taken aboard. This country is supposed to be about liberty –  and at its best it is, or tries to be. Washington understood the virtues of freedom. 

Those escaping slaves did too. 

I could wax eloquent about Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. No bone spurs for Teddy, and off he went, a volunteer, to fight in the Spanish-American War. Lincoln? “With malice toward none,” he said. That’s a sentiment you’d never hear escaping from Donald Trump’s intolerant lips.

 

I may be a liberal. But I don’t have any desire to “end America.” Neither do any of the people I know, most of whom are liberals of varying shades. We just don’t think Trump is a good president or even a good human being. 

In his speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump promised to save the nation’s statues and establish a “National Garden of American Heroes.” It would be a vast outdoor park, he said, filled with statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live.” 

You know he envisioned himself, at least ten times larger than life, looming over that garden.

 

With a final flourish, the President of the United States assured all Trump-loving Americans that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. And other Americans. He cried out against those who might dare to vote him out of office. “They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” he said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them [emphasis added].” 

Yes, the American people would not allow the American people to…what? Exercise the right to protest? Use the vote in November to “take” America from Trump-loving Americans? 

There’s your fascism, right there.

 

* 

REMEMBER when Trump called himself a “wartime president?” We seem to be in full retreat. 

Florida set a record on the Fourth of July, with 11,458 new COVID cases. That broke the record set on July 2, when the state had 10,109. 

France, which aided us with troops, supplies and ships, and did so much to help Washington and his men achieve our independence, had 480 cases on July 3 and 448 on July 4. 

Across the U.S., new cases of coronavirus piled up again, with, 

52,228 on Independence Day. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Some years ago, fireworks at Mt. Rushmore were banned, after bark beetle infestations killed much of the pine forest surrounding the mountain. Climate change had allowed beetles to survive winters that used to be cold enough to kill their larvae. 

Trump helped overturn the fireworks ban at the monument, explaining in his typical, clueless style: “What can burn? It’s stone.” 

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/15/21): Governor Kristi Noem, who invited Trump to speak at Mt. Rushmore, and gave him the bust, went on to become one of the leading suck ups in the GOP. For a time, there were even rumors that she might replace Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket. At one point, she scored points with anti-maskers by riding mask-less into an indoor rodeo show on her horse (named “Hydroxychloroquine?”). Naturally, she had an American flag in one hand, the other on the reins. As for the danger of the coronavirus, Rolling Stone reports, 

“I choose to rely on science and data and facts,” said Noem, despite disregarding the actual science and data.

 

Then she pushed in all her chips. In August, she urged Americans to ride into Sturgis for the annual motorcycle rally. “We hope people come,” Noem told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. She lambasted the left’s negativity. “We’re in a good spot.” So the Harleys came and their riders drank beer and shot pool in crowded bars. They stood shoulder to shoulder, all 366,000 of them, as Smash Mouth’s singer screamed, “Fuck that Covid shit!”

 

In January 2021, Gov. Noem campaigned against two Democratic candidates in a special Georgia senate election. She called them “communists,” which would be about as accurate as insisting that Noem was a member of the Nazi Party. She isn’t. She’s just an imbecile. Or, as a writer for Rolling Stone describes her, “Trumpism with a cowgirl face.” 

Gov. Noem also plays fast and loose with facts. In 2010 she won a seat in Congress, as her political star began to rise. 

Noem was added to the House committee dealing with estate-tax issues, and in 2015 took to the floor and spoke about how the federal government made her family’s situation ever more desperate.

 

“It wasn’t very long after [her father] was killed that we got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy happen to our family. … I chose to take out a loan, but it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes. It is one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics, because I didn’t understand how bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C., could make a law that says when a tragedy hits a family, they somehow are owed something from that family business.”

 

The only problem was that her story is, charitably, a tall tale. The IRS doesn’t send a tax bill after a death; it waits for you to file a tax return first. Both USA Today and Huffington Post pointed out that while Noem’s family did pay roughly $169,000 in estate taxes over a decade, it was at the hardly onerous rate of four percent interest. In addition, the entire tax could have been avoided if Arnold [her father] had simply updated his will, something he hadn’t done for more than a decade. That small act would have allowed for a tax-free transfer. The media also noted that during the time Noem’s family was paying off their low-interest debt, they received $3.7 million in farm subsidies. Arnold also had left his wife a $1 million insurance policy that easily could have paid off the tax, but a smart accountant probably figured carrying a loan at four percent was a good deal.

 

Noem alternated between saying the law was still a bad law and keeping her mouth closed when confronted by Capitol Hill reporters. Mostly she just kept walking.

 

Next step was a successful run for governor of her state – and what at least one critic has called “arguably the worst response” to the coronavirus threat of any governor in the nation. 

As far as her commitment to science, on the day she took office “she held a prayer service that included a minister who called for all the demons in Pierre [the state capital] to be vanquished.” 

Other than galloping around on her horse, Noem seemed not to do much of anything about the health crisis, except to hope it went away, and make the situation worse with her rhetoric. 

 Something often misunderstood about masking in South Dakota — and perhaps a reason for the initially low infection rate — is that many of South Dakota’s towns and cities invoked their own policies during the outbreak’s early days. But when the plague didn’t come immediately, South Dakotans rebelled against their more conscientious political leaders. Noem offered no support, and a masking mandate crumbled in Sioux Falls when the Republican mayor voted against it. Across the state, in Rapid City, Common City Council President Laura Armstrong created a Facebook page promoting local businesses complying with CDC guidelines as well as mask-required businesses for those worried about contracting the virus. Conservative activists likened her to a Nazi and brought pictures of yellow Stars of David to council meetings. They threatened her on social media and trespassed on her isolated property (multiple times), and a colleague of hers had the lug nuts loosened on a family car. Noem said nothing.

 

Or said something stupid, actually. In October 2020, she traveled to Naples, Florida to give a speech. With her went Corey Lewandowski, of Trump 2016 campaign fame. Rolling Stone sets the scene: 

Noem and Lewandowski headlined their own event on October 9th, 2020. Trump was still in quarantine after his Covid sickness, but that didn’t stop a maskless Noem and Lewandowski from speaking to 250 people in a Naples, Florida, VFW Hall.

 

“At some point we have to let Americans live,” shouted Lewandowski. Noem added, “If someone is concerned about these events they can stay home.”

 

It was just more of the simplistic kind of garbage that Trump and people like Noem had been peddling for months. You could, as Lewandowski so cluelessly suggested, stay home from such events. What you couldn’t do was avoid contact with fools who attended, who might talk to you later at the supermarket, or if you were a clerk at the grocery, might sneeze on you while they checked you out. If your daughter dated the son of a father who went to hear Noem speak, and that father got infected, his boy might pass the virus on to your daughter, and then to you… 

That’s the dilemma Noem refused to face. 

At the same time Noem and Lewandowski spoke, Donald J. Trump was still in quarantine, himself, after a very close call and a trip to the hospital by helicopter, after he caught COVID-19.