TEMPERING TRUMPY TRIUMPHALISM?

During Freedom Weekend, Our President delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that had the cheering section on a Trump-friendly network, as well as Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer. cheerful.

Surely, we can compare and contrast Our President's triumphalism with  the sort of speech National Review's Jeffrey Blehar feared.

I remember when a friend of mine, back in the fall of 2024, ran down the list of reasons he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Aside from all of the political ones — which need no rehearsal here — he ended with a throw-in point that actually moved me somewhat: “I don’t want America’s 250th anniversary to be run by Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

And that was an argument I immediately understood. Imagine the public disgraces that Kamala’s Semiquincentennial would have officially sanctioned in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It would have been a yearlong lecture with July 4 a day of solemn reflection and recrimination. After Trump won in November, I heard similar sentiments from some of my friends, even those unpersuaded by Trump themselves: At least he wouldn’t be collaborating with the New York Times 1619 Project to turn America’s 250th into some ghastly yearlong anti-American display.

We could, at least, have had a pool on whether President Harris would be sober or sozzled during such a speech.  But to be spared a no-longer-lucid President Biden or a perpetually scolding President Obama, or a screechy, whether sober or sozzled, President Hillary Clinton is a blessing.

Do you ask, dear reader, how bad that could be?  This bad.  "‘How Small They Are’: Mamdani Takes Apart MAGA’s Vision of America in July 4 Address."

The Militant Normals offered correctives, almost immediately.

Wow, they sure all look THRILLED to be American! https://t.co/HkPwLKP4W4

— Kate Hyde (@KateHydeNY) July 3, 2026

Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer concurs, this in a different column.

New York City’s Communist Twelver Shi’ite Mayor Zohran Mamdani has bestowed upon a waiting world his speech commemorating America’s 250^th anniversary, and it is just as small, petty, grievance-laden, fantasy-based, and angry as you’d expect a speech from a man who hates America to be.

The visual effect was even worse, as Mamdani delivered the speech while seated at a desk that seemed to be turned the wrong way around, while surrounded by a social studies-book array of glum-looking, unsmiling, unhappy people, all black and brown and hijabed and whatnot and all forlornly holding small flags of the country their mayor despises, with a single grim-faced white guy standing in the back (as is his place). But even if one didn’t avail oneself of the joys of watching Mamdani, who was just as grim as his prop companions, what the young Commie mayor said was bad enough.

The desk has drawers on both sides, for whatever that's worth. The mayor later revised and extended his remarks, which Common Dreams have not yet noted, for whatever that's worth.  Legal Insurrection's Mary Chastain notes that the constituents, who are holding the flags they received at naturalization earlier in the day, refute by their presence what the mayor asserts.  "The dude literally had a handful of naturalized citizens around him and he says America doesn’t welcome people?"

Yes, Our President did one of his signature weaves, and he got some of his grievances in, to the distaste of the coastal cosmopolitans, "The New York Times report was dripping with so much contempt that you’d think it was the good old days again, when they were sneering at Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan," as well as of David Smith with The Guardian.  "Trump launches US’s 250th birthday celebrations with partisan attack."

Maybe, notes Liel Leibowitz in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, the partisanship misses the point.

This Fourth of July weekend, in between barbecues and fireworks and celebrations galore, the country was treated, naturally, to two speeches by our headliner politicians: New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump. The speeches were built up by pundits as a political doubleheader, offering twin visions of America present, past, and future, one from the left and the other from the right.

But if you were to judge the weekend by their blustering words, you’d find, lamentably, that the land of the pilgrims’ pride was nowhere in evidence as we celebrated the semiquincentennial of this great and godly nation. Instead, we got two tumescent orations, vastly divergent in tone and content, yet both reminding us just how much work we’ve ahead of us as we struggle to live up to the Founders’ sacred vision.

Perhaps the best course of action would be to tune the noise out and focus on the symbolism.

We need leaders who have learned from America’s splendid history that the greatest gift you can give this inimitable country—the only one, in fact, it demands of you—is to serve it with humility and prudence. Seeking to remake it in your own image or place it under the yoke of your inflamed ideology or trying to guide it through the night with nothing but hot air are two sides of the same disastrous coin.

If our politics become a contest between those who hate America and are taking vigorous actions to change it, and those who love America but are doing little or nothing to save it, the next 250 years will be an uphill battle.

Luckily, we needn’t be too worried. Because had you turned off the sound on both speeches this past weekend, you would’ve walked away with a radically different outlook, one far cheerier than anything the mayor of New York or the president of the United States could muster. Mamdani was sitting behind George Washington’s historic desk, and Trump was standing at the foothills of Mount Rushmore—proof positive that America is greater than the sum of its partisans. The historic desk, the splendid mountain—these two inanimate objects, without saying a word, told us everything we needed to know about America this Fourth of July, reminding us that elected officials, good and ghastly alike, come and go, but that the great American spirit, unparalleled and undiminished, is forever.

The American Founding is a bet on emergence, and a country "greater than the sum of its partisans" is one beyond the poor power of elected officials, good or ghastly, to add or to detract.

Somehow, whoever wrote the message for former president Joe Biden came closest to capturing the spirit of the thing.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of Americans signed their names to a piece of parchment and made a promise no nation had ever made before: that we're all created equal, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We're… pic.twitter.com/5AZsSORlUi

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 4, 2026

It might not have been given to any of us to complete the task and yet we dare not give it up.