Incendiary Trump risks setting America on fire

Before he’d even had the chance to speak at Mount Rushmore on Friday, Donald Trump had already made headlines by saluting his way through the national anthem.

It was a revealing faux pas given that these things are so formalised, specifically in 36 US Code § 301, which states that “individuals in uniform should give the military salute at the first note of the anthem and maintain that position until the last note”. Civilians, including any president who isn’t also a veteran, should “face the flag and stand at attention with their right hand over the heart”.

Trump never served but his gesture was indicative of the night that followed, in which the President of the United States wildly appropriated symbols that he had no right to.

His speech was a crudely stitched tapestry of Americana, at times as crass as it was nonsensical, using figures of the black Civil Rights movement to sell his vision of a Law and Order President suppressing the protests triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement.

He used Rushmore itself as a warning to anybody who might want to deface a statue: “This monument will never be desecrated,” he said in that soft voice we’ve come to recognise from other times he has tried to claim the moral high ground.

“These heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.”

It wasn’t just hubris from a modern-day Ozymandias. It was questionable rhetoric in Trump’s escalating culture war.

The Mount Rushmore we know today is already a defaced relic of an earlier people. The mountain had been a sacred site to the Lakota Sioux who probably also thought their monument would “stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers”, before the Black Hills were taken from them and many lost their lives in the notorious Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.

It set the tone for the night when Trump claimed to be protecting history, yet did his utmost to seize it for himself, declaring that “America’s great and good” were all on his side.

It’s perhaps a measure of his peril that he would indulge in such brazen politicking; citing a deliberately provocative list of right-wing icons, notionally made acceptable by the judicious sprinkling of figures from the Civil Rights movement.

He attached himself to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, yet also boasted about “America First”. Andrew Jackson, the “Indian killer”, shared a roll call with the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was name-checked alongside Wild Bill Hickok, a lawman with a notoriously fickle moral code. Walt Whitman, the poet of America’s “geography and natural life and rivers and lakes”, stood next to Buffalo Bill Cody, the man who was said to have once killed 4282 buffalo in just eighteen months. Even Frank Sinatra got a mention, prompting daughter Nancy Sinatra to point out on Twitter that her father “actually did loathe him”.

Then there was “Alyssias” [sic] S. Grant, Frederick Douglas, the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Jesse Owens, Louis Armstrong, Alan Shephard, Elvis Presley, Mohammad Ali, Mark Twain, and Irving Berlin. Then, just lest we forgot that this was a Trump event, there was George S. Patton. There’s always room for George S. Patton.

In the end, the litany of names felt as bloated as the speech, which too often relied on prolonged repetition. “We will proclaim the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and we will never surrender the spirit and the courage and the cause of July the Fourth, 1776,” he read. “Upon this ground, we will stand firm and unwavering in the face of lies meant to divide us, demoralize us, and diminish us. We will show that the story of America unites us, inspires us, includes us all, and makes everyone free.”

It was a speech constantly reaching for timelessness yet bogged down with this President’s preoccupation with enemies and traitors.

What was remarkable wasn’t so much the dark tone – typical of any speech written by Stephen “American Carnage” Miller – but the lack of irony in the way Trump went about brashly appropriating American culture.

He walked off stage to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”, a favourite of his, taken from the  album, Freedom, released in 1989. Young is a staunch liberal, a Bernie Sanders supporter, who on the album cover even wears a Trotskyish cap with five-pointed star.

He has previously asked Trump to stop using the song, which is actually an ironic anthem on George H.W. Bush’s America, but the President refuses to listen, “just as he chooses not to listen to the many American voices who ask him to stop his constant lies, to stop his petty, nasty name-calling and bullying, to stop pushing his dangerous, vilifying and hateful rhetoric.” On Friday, Young reiterated his objection, by tweeting “I stand in solidarity with the Lakota Sioux & this is NOT ok with me.”

Young has no legal recourse to stop Trump, but then neither do any of these historical figures, which lent the whole spectacle an extra note of absurdity as the President made the night’s big announcement.

Trump has always had an eye for the gimmick, and his latest plan is a new theme park called “the National Garden of American Heroes”, which will be “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live”. We probably have some time before we need to think about tickets. At present, it’s hard to view it as anything but a cynical gesture towards his base.

Before the event, experts had warned about exploding fireworks over the Black Hills, known to be a fire risk due to the amount of highly combustible Ponderosa pine in the area. It is the reason fireworks have been banned for ten years. Trump didn’t listen. Yet in risking setting the park on fire, Trump has provided a fitting metaphor for the speech, as well as a president who would risk setting America ablaze to save his political career.

Here, after all, was the star pupil of Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, condemning the “new far-left fascism” that will ensure that citizens will be “censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished”.

He styles himself a champion of freedom, but announces he is “deploying federal law enforcement to protect our monuments”, boasting of hundreds of arrests, as well as new powers to imprison anybody who damages or defaces a federal statue or monument for a  “minimum of 10 years in prison”.

This comes from the same president who described Roger Stone’s 40-month sentence for lying to Congress as “a very, very rough thing that happened”.

It made for a deeply unsettling way to celebrate the Fourth of July on the third of July, but, then, with fireworks, tinder, and a long dry summer before election season, what could possibly go wrong?