Donald Trump is a stump speaker. His manner and rhetoric when speaking to Congress, as he did last Tuesday night, is the same manner and rhetoric he uses when speaking to ordinary people at a country fairgrounds.
Indeed when he speaks to the members of Congress he’s talking past them to the ordinary people who support him, many of whom hold Congress in contempt.
As for the speech, Lincoln it wasn’t. President Trump’s speech comes to nearly 10,000 words. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was 272 words.
It would be a mistake to conclude that, for all of the president’s rhetorical excess and indifference to syntax, his jabs at the Democrats who stared at him with undisguised loathing, and his lengthy introductions of grieving mothers and other good folks invited to connect his efforts with real Americans, that he isn’t talking about serious matters and referring to serious ideas.
This is a time of crisis, brought on by 90 years of almost continuous overspending and the accumulation of debts that will destroy us if we do not reverse their growth. Much of it was accumulated for worthwhile things we could not or would not pay for when we needed or wanted them. In recent years of excess, some of it was accumulated for purposes so repugnant, perverse, and wasteful that only shameless people try to defend them.
As I listened my mind turned to the beginning of an elegant speech as apt today as in 1933:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjust terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
It’s clear that FDR (this is from his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933) inserted the sentence about fear, breaking up a complete thought (the nation will revive and prosper because the people will support vigorous leadership) with an admonition not to fear the present nor the changes to come. He borrowed the idea from Thoreau, who had written “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”
It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump turning to the inherited wisdom in books for inspiration. He isn’t bookish. His rhetoric comes from his nature, forceful and impatient.
But he sees the present crisis. He is determined to address it with “frankness and vigor.”
Not even his harshest critics deny his vigor. They may suspect he is not frank about his motives — Bernie Sanders, who stayed for the whole speech, bluntly accuses the president of aiming to enrich billionaires.
The president actually seems intent on nurturing “the American Dream,” a phrase he invoked at the beginning and end of the speech.
“The American Dream is surging bigger and better than ever before,” he began, adding, “the American Dream is unstoppable.” At the end he promised, “We are going to renew unlimited promise of the American Dream.”
He didn’t say what the American Dream means, but he seems to be using it as shorthand for the aspiration of ordinary Americans to achieve prosperity through their own merit — aspirations choked by high taxes, excess regulation, and preferments based on social categories.
That aspiration is as old as our republic, but the phrase is not. Like the Pledge of Allegiance, introduced in 1892, “the American Dream” was first used in a way we would recognize in 1900, as the rhetoric of modern patriotism was taking shape.
It referred to the hope that America would fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence by securing rights to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to all Americans.
Liberty — the absence of restraint — guards the path to material prosperity. But the American Dream, properly understood, includes the Pursuit of Happiness, which refers to the personal fulfillment achieved by virtuous deeds — sacrificing private gain and setting aside selfish motives for the good of other people, or what our Revolutionary generation called benevolence.
That’s what makes the American Dream a noble aim. The president should keep it in sight.
Jack Warren is an authority on the history of American politics and public life and editor of The American Crisis, an online journal of history and commentary (www.americanideal.org). His newest book is, "Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution." Read Jack Warren's Reports — More Here.
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