Trump Delivers Masterclass in Irony on Eve of Nation’s 250th Birthday

We don’t often applaud Donald Trump, but it is remarkable that he managed to keep a straight face when saying that Americans hadn’t shed their blood across the globe “just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot and pillage our nation” a mere days after revealing that he made more than $2 billion in his first year back in the White House.

Since most of the president’s speeches are so similar, we weren’t going to bother with covering the address he gave in front of Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s semiquincentennial celebration. However, his self-congratulatory remarks were so rife with irony that we felt that it was appropriate to give them a reality check.

This seems particularly necessary because his presidency symbolizes such a stark departure from what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they declared the country’s independence 250 years ago.

For example, when he suggested that “no one has ever given more to charity, ended more hunger, cured more disease, or done more to uplift humanity than Americans,” it bears remembering that his administration has drastically reduced life-saving foreign aid; keeps threatening allies and suggesting withdrawal from the defensive alliance that has kept Western democracies safe for 75 years; and caused often crippling price increases across the globe with tariffs and the war against Iran, in which the US military almost certainly killed more than 100 school girls.

To be fair, this must not have been an easy speech for him to deliver since he was forced to talk about American greatness throughout the past 250 years and not only during the five-and-a-half years of his presidency, and about the greatness of people who aren’t him.

However, he largely managed to stay on script, apart from pointing out, for example, that he won South Dakota “really big.”

Trump correctly noted that “liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it,” without pointing out that his own character, and that of the loyalists he surrounds himself with, now threatens that very liberty.

Another line that caught our eye was when the president said that Americans “treasure justice, fairness, family, honesty, and human dignity.”

While Trump undoubtedly is helping his family get rich while he is in office, he is also the least honest and most undignified person to ever lead the United States. In addition, it is quite something for a convicted felon who just failed in his bid to get a verdict overturned that held him liable for the sexual abuse of a New York woman to talk about treasuring justice and “see[ing] every citizen as an individual equal under the law.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy part of the speech was the one in which he warned of the non-existent threat of communism in the US.

Sounding like a politician during the McCarthy era, he said, “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”

Trump called this ideology, which was first described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, “The enemy of July 4th, 1776.”

“[Communists] have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder,” he said. “Such doctrines can be given no quarter in a democracy because the first thing they do when they get into power is turn around and destroy it.”

While nobody can accuse the president of being a communist, even though he has procured government stakes in some companies and the libertarian Cato Institute called his approach “state capitalism,” Trump has certainly been trying to destroy democracy in and out of office.

He once again affirmed that on Friday night when he used the address to pressure Republican senators to change the rules and pass a voter suppression law that has been his top legislative priority this year.

“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise,” the president proclaimed. “But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”

In case you are wondering, one-party rule sounds a lot more like communism than democracy.

Finally, no Trump speech would be complete without him airing some sort of personal grievance. True to form, he once again lamented that he had not been given a Nobel Peace Prize, an honor that was bestowed upon Teddy Roosevelt, one of the four presidents commemorated on Mount Rushmore. And, had it been around then, it probably also would have been given to the other three – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln – for their achievements in casting off the yoke of oppression, promoting liberty, forging a republic, and ending slavery.

Seeing them in the background of Trump’s speech served as a much-needed reminder that great men have served in his office before and that great men and women will do so again long after he is gone.