“I hate wind.”
—Donald J. Trump
Well, he should know.
You will have heard, by now, about Donald Trump’s incredible paean to the battle of Gettysburg. If you haven’t, you simply must—no two ways about it—watch this one minute documentary from the historian Randall Stephens (hat tip: Taegan Goddard). These are his actual words. Hilarious, of course. But attention must be paid. Old friend Steve Schmidt, that master of delicious diatribe, finds legitimate reason for outrage: If Joe Biden had wandered off the farm in similar fashion, the nation—led by the mainstream media—would be calling for his senescent head. Schmidt goes on:
It is just one more example of why [Trump] is permanently anchored in a bay of ignominy 180 degrees opposite Abraham Lincoln’s greatness. There, in the muck, dreck and nastiness, dwells a low man who leads a lower cause that stands against Americanism.
All of which is true, but I find a different lesson in all this: Have you noticed how hard it is for Donald Trump to say anything positive? Or inspirational? Or kind? About anything? It’s always American Carnage, even with a plummeting crime rate. He’s a genius when it comes to carefully calibrated invective. You get the sense that his anger is real, even if his targets are trumped up, as it were. The rage comes from someplace deep inside him, from his childhood, from his tyrannical father, I’d guess. This is a lad who was perpetually dissed, or thought he was. But who knows? The resentment seethes, unstoppable.
Which makes the contrast all the more stark: he is emotionally paralyzed to the point of incoherence when the occasion calls for praise or vision, or the acknowledgment of greatness. He doesn’t know what to make of Gettysburg. His language, never much beyond elementary school level, lapses toward kindergarten. Wow, indeed: that was some battle! He hugs the American flag, but I’ve never heard him say anything memorable or insightful about the triumph of America. Which makes him a perfect man for this moment. I’ve been reading Frank Bruni’s new book The Age of Grievance, which is smart and wonderfully written, as is everything Bruni does, but also perplexing and rather sad: The old adage—if you don’t have something nice to say, better to say nothing at all—has been turned on its head. If you don’t have something evil to say, you have no credibility. This has become a national plague, a disease. What on earth is going on?
Here we are, the most privileged people in the history of the world, thriving in a country that people are crashing our borders to live in…and we find it near-impossible to toot our own horns, to assay optimism, even a little. We live in a soap bubble of safety, beneath an iron dome of affluence—and we have lost, over the past 75 years, any reasonable sense of vulnerability…or, stranger still, of achievement. We simply don’t know how lucky we are. And how unlucky others are. Nothing seems real, except the endorphins unleashed by rage. There is no sense of how dangerous anger can be, and the violence that springs from it. There is no sense of consequence, that this gesture—and all life is gestural to the witlessly pampered—might lead to something real bad happening, something horrible beyond imagining. Or, at least, beyond our imagining. In our protected state, imagination has withered.
You see otherwise reasonable voices—I’m looking at you, Walter Russell Mead—saying that Israel must retaliate against Iran. Why on earth? There have been fewer, more comprehensive victories in the annals of war than Israel’s weekend dismissal of Iranian rocketry, and fewer more humiliating defeats. The absence of retaliation would be the ultimate statement of disdain. But it is easy to counsel violence when you’ve never really experienced violence. Churchill, that impossible romantic, said there is nothing more exhilarating than being shot at “without effect.” The truth is, there is nothing more terrifying than being shot at. There is no sound louder than a bomb exploding above your head. There is no sight more confusing and illogical than a human body torn to pieces by munitions. But those sights are censored from our networks, which—I believe—the worst sort of journalistic malpractice. We have no sense of what the wages of violence are. And so we have Donald Trump’s Party of the Disingenuously Aggrieved playing games with life-and-death aid to Israel and, especially, to Ukraine. Here’s Josh Rogin in The WaPo:
On Sunday, these MAGA lawmakers went public with their push to shelve Ukraine aid. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who opposes any aid to Ukraine, posted on X, “It’s antisemitic to make Israeli aid contingent on funding Ukrainian Nazis.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) posted on X, “If we send billions to Ukraine because of this Iranian attack, the terrorists win.”
Good thing the Jews have those space lasers Greene has touted. As for Matt Gaetz: Huh? And then there is Louisiana’s invertebrate Rep. Garret Graves:
Look, the reality is, you have to keep in mind President Biden asked for Ukraine, President Biden asked for Israel, President Biden asked for aid for Taiwan, and President Biden supports the changes to TikTok. What are Republicans getting out of this?
And there is Louisiana’s other hero, Rep. Mike Johnson—doesn’t he look like an overmatched pharmacist?—playing games with the funds (for Ukraine, especially) in order to retain control of his caucus of cowards. Meanwhile, the Russians do what Russians do: turn defeat into stalemate, and stalemate into attrition, and attrition into victory. David Ignatius, who has been around more than a couple of actual battlefields in his life, has a riveting interview with the Ukrainian General Kyrylo Budanov, who talks about the importance of taking the war to the Russian homeland:
The goal is to show that President Vladimir Putin cannot “protect the population from the war getting into Russia,” he explained. “When you’re sitting, say, in St. Petersburg, and you’re seeing the war only on TV, you will always be supportive. … But people start to get nervous when some facility [is attacked] near their house.”
Yes, exactly. And that was my first thought when I read about the leftist ninnies who stormed a New York subway train, hassling Jews and chanting: “Iran You Make Us Proud.” I would like them to have the same experience I once had: being chased through the streets of Tehran by members of the religious police, the basij, on motorcycles swinging truncheons. There were democracy-loving quietist Mullahs in the crowd that day, getting their heads cracked open by the religious police. (Yes, there are such people.) But that’s a level of complexity that America’s Iran- and Hamas-lovers simply can’t imagine because of their simplistic, bone-headed notions of “oppression.” . They are, like Trump, aggrieved performance artists. Their naïveté is toxic. They don’t know how vulnerable their cherished rights and irresponsibilities are. They don’t understand the aid and comfort they give to tyrants.
But there was a piece in The Washington Post today about the price some Hamas-lovers are paying for their “free” speech:
Dani Marzouca was in bed trying to sleep when the phone started buzzing. An organization dedicated to publicly rebuking critics of Israel had posted on X a clip of Marzouca declaring that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.”
The 20-second clip, from an Instagram live stream, rapidly garnered more than 1 million views. Soon, the group, StopAntisemitism, was calling Marzouca a “Hamas terrorist supporter” and tagging [her] employer, the branding firm Terakeet of Syracuse, N.Y. Hundreds of people commented on X, LinkedIn and email, including one who asked: “Do you really have antisemites like this working for you, @Terakeet?”
Within a day, Marzouca was fired — a development Terakeet announced as a reply to StopAntisemitism’s thread on X, 15 hours after the original post.
There are some who will say this is excessive punishment. Perhaps it is. But it may take some real-life consequences for Americans to understand the damage their stone cold ignorant grievances can do.
Pitch
In the past few weeks, Sanity Clause has been deluged with new “followers.” I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds suspicious. I’m not looking for followers, like some overdressed telecharlatan or worse, an “influencer”—the current, godawful term of art for someone who needs social media cosseting. I’m hoping for subscribers, thoughtful ones who’ll push back. You can subscribe for free. Or, if you’re really feeling agitated and generous, you can purchase some Sanity. There are immediate benefits: paid subscribers can have high-minded colloquies with me in the comments section. There will be other benefits down the road, chats and stuff. Your support is truly appreciated.
I’m an old friend of Joes in both senses. And I’m a subscriber, for money. Sanity clause deserves the support. My reaction to this column was that a conclusion was missing. About Joe Biden. Joe Klein has commented very, very, very often about Biden’s age, faltering steps, aged senescent appearance, wish there were someone else. Etc. The Gettysburg piece with Trump made something else obvious. The media has complet normalized Trump - yes,he’s terrible and woukd be awful, but look at Biden, wishhe weren’t there. It’s time to stop. Biden is what we got, yes it woukd be better if he were 20 years younger, he looks all of 81 (I’m older than Biden is and guess what? If you’re 81, you look and feel,it. Can’t get away from it) But he’s been a good president and if you think that managing the multiple crises of the last years is,simple then you’re as dumb as my cousin a good ole boy who thought the turtle got on the fence post,by accident. I
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESSES
Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. "
~ ~ ~
Donald J. Trump on April 12, 1014:
“Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable ― I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways.
“Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”