HIJACKING HIS BULLY PULPIT?

Professional protester Michael Winship is not happy that Our President wants to make himself Master of Ceremonies at this year's Independence Day festivities.

Trump's favorite perks surrounding the office of being president revolve around a similar but exponentially greater grandiosity: he wallows in the overall pomp and circumstance of the job and the receiving of or presenting awards and honors; anything focusing on him that doesn't take too much mental effort.

So as we enter the official beginning of summer with the Memorial Day weekend, we need to look ahead just a few weeks to the next big holiday and realize, with a shudder, that even the Fourth of July, that most patriotic of American celebrations isn’t safe. Solid ego and id, Trump has decided to make it all about him.

It began with a surprise tweet from him in late February: "HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called 'A Salute To America' and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!"

It gives Mr Winship opportunity to have a good wallow in the past, invoking another president much despised by the Angry Left.

The last time something like this happened was nearly fifty years ago, in 1970, when Washington's Fourth of July was rechristened "Honor America Day," exactly two months after the National Guard killed four kids at Kent State University in Ohio during protests against Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. (A week and a half later, police killed two more demonstrators at Jackson State University in Mississippi.)

In the wake of this violent national division, and bipartisan claims to the contrary, "Honor America Day" was created as a celebration of Richard Nixon organized by his pals J. Willard Marriott, the hotel magnate; the Rev. Billy Graham and Bob Hope. As per historian Kevin Kruse, "Organizers self-consciously recruited conservative crowds, sending White House advance teams across the country to bring 350,000 members of Nixon's Silent Majority to the capital by car, train and bus."

I was there. I had been taking a course in filmmaking taught by a local priest at Washington's free university. In the wake of the national student strike and antiwar demonstrations that had closed DC's colleges, classes were done, so he and I decided to take the Super 8 mm camera we had been using and film the events of Honor America Day.

We met up early and began shooting the spectators dressed up in variations of red-white-and-blue finery and the many counter-protesters who had gathered as well. We worked our way over to the Lincoln Memorial where Billy Graham was leading a prayer service. Simultaneously, a smoke-in featuring red-white-and-blue joints began with lot of stripping down and jumping naked into the reflecting pool in front of the memorial. Meanwhile, a small group of young neo-Nazis shouted abuse. It was quite a scene.

Throughout the hot and humid day, there were confrontations between police and protesters. It all culminated in the evening when a nationally broadcast extravaganza hosted by Bob Hope and featuring a taped address from Nixon plus performances by Jack Benny, Red Skelton and Dinah Shore was broadcast from the Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument.

Demonstrators pushed through police lines and tear gas was fired. But the gas, intended for protesters, accidentally drifted into the crowd there for the show and pandemonium ensued. The gas hit us, and I always swear this is true, it was while Kate Smith was singing "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever."

It's probably a good thing the heavies didn't know Kate Smith's full discography, or you would likely have had an even more violent protest.

Mr Winship's concluding remarks are instructive.

Instead of bringing the nation together, they only served to illustrate just how divided it had become — or perhaps to remind us how divided it has always been.”

If Trump insists on making the anniversary of our nation's birth a celebration of him, he will antagonize two-thirds of the country and perhaps thrill the other third that constitute his base. But his overreach will symbolize all that he has done to the country, trampling tradition and unity, trampling the tenets of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that we commemorate on the Fourth, and trampling American democracy as no other president has ever done.

As far as I know, there are no internment camps for citizens in operation, no suspensions of habeas corpus, no garrisons at Arlington Cemetery or Fort Steadman.

I invoke those events because an anonymous Washington Post gripe about that presidential action requires them as context.  "One can get happily lost imagining how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy might have graced such an occasion."

You don't have to imagine.  On Independence Day, 1863, Abraham Lincoln had just received word that the Army of the Potomac had held at Gettysburg, and that Vicksburg was taken.  He used the opportunity a few days later to offer a brief, unplanned speech to a cheering crowd in Lafayette Plaza.  "How long ago is it?  Eighty-odd years -- since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that 'all men are created equal.'"  He had another four months to revise and extend those remarks into the more familiar form.

We ought be grateful that the fractures in the international order, disturbing though they might be, are taking place at a time of relative calm, and we might pray that the world will little note, nor long remember what either Mr Trump says or how Mr Winship will trash it.

Yes, I did write "relative calm."  That despite what attorney general William Barr noted recently.

I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven't seen bill of particulars as to how that's being done. From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring."

That interview has been recommended at Insta Pundit and Power Line.  And yes, I'm troubled that the very people who professed to be most appalled before the election that anybody would dare question the results of an election seem to be the people most devoted to questioning the results of an election.

On the other hand, as Don Surber concludes, "We have been fortunate to have good men come along at the right moments."  It doesn't hurt, either, that the brain-brothers of the people who, like Mr Winship, are now counting on Process, are the very people who, for a long time, have used every opportunity they have to deconstruct the institutions they now hope to rely on.  They're not going to like the new rules.