What America Stands For
PARIS — Ronald Reagan moistened every eye within earshot atop that Normandy cliff in 1984, mine included: “In this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for.”
He was an actor who played president masterfully but had little grasp of the world he steered off course. On D-Day four decades later, Joe Biden was brief and low-key. An actual statesman, he said what is essential at the most perilous time in human history.
The men who died capturing Pointe du Hoc, he said, now summon us: “They ask us what we will do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs, but they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”
As a reporter, I’ve watched “morning in America” darken toward midnight in a wider world spinning out of control. Americans have four months to do what Samuel L. Jackson urged when the danger was only George W. Bush: Wake the Fuck Up.
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After November, one of two imperfect men will personify today’s America to the world. Beyond specific issues, what matters most are qualities that are talked about least: character, wisdom, integrity, experience, empathy. And sanity.
As Biden debates a self-obsessed criminal sociopath who lays out plainly his monstrous domestic and global intentions, most Americans will focus on how he comes across rather than what he has to say.
Voters blinded by greed or bedazzled by bullshit will declare Donald Trump the winner, no matter what. A roughly equal number will hear hard facts about what Biden has done to reverse the catastrophe Trump left behind.
In a nation now easily swayed by “optics” and snap judgments based on sound snippets, every single ballot is crucial.
Some of us octogenarians have years of shelf life left. Others not. Decreasing mobility is no measure of mental sharpness. Biden speaks stiffly at times, remnants of overcoming a childhood stutter. Sleepy Joe? Look at his travel log — to war zones, not golf courses.
If Biden must step aside, the transition would be smooth to an effective vice president respected abroad. Fresh young candidates can run in 2028.
Two of Trump’s likely running mates are Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Both excoriated him before heaping on praise. The third is J. D. Vance, a lawyer-author who is a first-term Ohio senator and an isolationist ideologue.
If Trump manages to last four years, his mercurial madness risks the unimaginable. What would a draft-dodger president have to say atop Pointe du Hoc?
At a Las Vegas rally, Trump spoke the first solid truth I have heard from him since I began covering his self-aggrandizing falsehoods off-and-on in the 1980s.
On D-Day, reporters recalled an Atlantic piece in 2020 based on four direct sources who described how Trump cancelled a visit to an American cemetery near Paris. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” he asked senior staff members. “It’s filled with losers.”
He fumed at the rally. “Unless you’re a psycho, a crazy person or a very stupid person,” he said, “who would say that, anyway? But who would say it to military people?” Exactly.
“Losers” and “suckers” recur often in his lexicon. In the 2015 campaign, he slurred John McCain, shot down over Hanoi and tortured by his captors. “He is not a war hero,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
In 2017, he went to Arlington National Cemetery with John Kelly, his Homeland Security secretary and later White House chief of staff. At the grave of Kelly’s son, a Marine killed in Afghanistan, he said: “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?”
Kelly himself later confirmed that, which the Atlantic reported along with a remark Trump made to his aides before reluctantly visiting Arlington: “Why should I go? It’s full of losers.”
Trump railed against “a made-up deal from a magazine that’s a failing, financial disaster.” He called Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor who wrote the piece, “a horrible, radical-left lunatic.” Two more assertions far from truth.
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Trump and the elephants he rode on are a cynical perversion of the Republican Party that traces back to Lincoln, crucial to a representative democracy where opposites duke it out to find a common course. History since the 1980s matters.
Many remember Reagan with fondness, even among those who saw him as a well-intended doofus. He chose competent aides in line with his conservative values who respected the Constitution. The courts and Congress were reasonably sane.
But he and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher opened a yawning gap that soon began to widen between rich and desperate. Big-money Republicans worked hard to dumb down public schools and privatize sectors of government.
Reagan sent troops to join peacekeepers in Beirut in 1983. Hezbollah suicide bombers killed 241 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors. He withdrew from Lebanon but invaded little Grenada in the Caribbean to thwart a leftist coup.
U.S. forces took weeks to subdue the island’s 1,500-man army and Cubans building an airport, armed only with AK47s. The U.N. General Assembly condemned “a flagrant violation of international law,” 108 to 9.
In the Middle East and beyond, America’s foes and “non-state actors” — terrorists — saw a musclebound superpower that spoke loudly and carried a stick that was not nearly big enough.
After 9/11 and George W. Bush’s pointless Iraq invasion, geopolitics got so dizzyingly complex that most Americans tuned them out. Whatever a politician said loud enough and often enough became entrenched alternate reality.
And now with Trump’s callous disregard for humanity and his Hitlerian-Machiavellian concept of democracy, anything is possible during an unhinged second term with neither checks nor balances.
Zero in, for instance, on Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth national security adviser and his likely choice for secretary of state. His catchphrase, Orwellian under the circumstances, is “peace through strength.”
An interview last week with Christiane Amanpour (link attached below) — or O’Brien’s piece in Foreign Affairs making the case for Trump (also attached) — ought to have voters lined up at the polls for days before they open on November 5.
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O’Brien, an attorney and political operative who held minor positions under Bush the younger, evaded Amanpour’s questions in an odd, stumbling monotone that depicted Trump’s worst failings as unprecedented triumphs.
He said the Abraham Accords brought Middle East peace. In fact, along with Trump’s support for Benjamin Netanyahu, they condemned Palestinians to apartheid, which sparked West Bank upheaval and pushed Hamas towards its Oct. 7 massacre.
He claimed Trump was first to arm Ukraine with missiles to hold off Russia, forgetting the 2017 impeachment for extortion of Volodymyr Zelensky, the most treacherous presidential act before Trump did worse, firing up an attack on the Capitol.
He said Trump made peace with North Korea. The ex-president’s Kim Jong Un debacle turned a hermit backwater into a serious nuclear threat. Kim now arms Russia in the Ukraine war Trump triggered by favoring Vladimir Putin over NATO allies.
He claimed Trump’s last two years in office were a resounding success, leaving out the pandemic that needlessly killed perhaps a half million Americans, collapsed the U.S. economy and crippled the World Health Organization along with the CDC.
He excoriated Iran as a major threat, omitting Trump’s rejection of accords that would have opened it to the world, slowed its quest for nuclear arms and reduced its support for terrorism across the region.
He blamed Xi Jinping for Trump’s flipflopping China policy and now wants to send American ships to isolate China, risking an all-out war that neither superpower can win without destroying the planet.
He gave Trump credit for Barack Obama’s success at energy independence and now pushes fossil-fuel exploitation that speeds up climate collapse far faster than even cautious scientists predicted.
When Amanpour asked about the long list of top military leaders, diplomats and others who left the White House with dire warnings, he dismissed them as expendable minions. Trump, he said, has people like Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo – and himself.
If that doesn’t terrify you, read the Foreign Affairs piece, which displayed either total ignorance or, more likely, disregard for easily verified truth.
O’Brien said Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter who did not take the United States into a war. True, but he triggered one in Ukraine and another in Gaza while pushing China to prepare for a full-on conflict with America.
Also, he said Trump “ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”
Americans joined European allies to provide logistics so Kurds and other Iraqis could capture the Caliphate. Other leaders, more extreme, replaced al-Baghdadi. ISIS fighters fled into Africa and beyond to forge terrorist alliances as a continuing, growing menace.
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Biden’s most serious threat may be young activists and others who fault him for not reacting hard enough to Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza. Many will waste a ballot on an also-ran or just stay home. Either way, that amounts to a vote for Trump.
Biden has kept the Gaza war from widening. His diplomacy pushes for a two-state settlement, and his measured military presence stops Hezbollah from an all-out assault on Israel’s north.
But few voters realize the limits on a president facing strong pro-Israel sentiment at home. The risk is losing the White House to the man who would make a bad situation unfathomably worse.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, a MAGA zealot lusting after political power, went to Israel to denounce Biden and champion Trump. She told the Knesset that Israelis must “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” She is far from the most strident.
As former CIA director Leon Panetta responded, that’s not going to happen. Hamas’s strategy is to provoke what the world sees as atrocities despite Palestinian casualties. Israel can only cripple Hamas leadership and negotiate a workable future for Gaza.
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Foreign follies aside, consider what Trump promises at home. Project 2025, an 800-page plan to turn America into a one-party tyranny in the first 180 days, smacks of Mein Kampf, perhaps the only book that Trump has ever thumbed through.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” its website says. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place.”
That means eviscerating the Department of Justice, packing it with lawyers who stamp out dissent. A Stephen Miller could purify bloodlines. A Steve Bannon could muzzle truthful reporting and, as he puts it, “flood the zone with shit.” And so on.
For now, a cacophonous and overwhelmed “mainstream media” can only steer people toward informing themselves more deeply on their own.
Solid reporting is out there, but finding it is like panning for nuggets in a torrential river. Despite sanctimonious slogans, too many news executives who see profit in Trump’s absurd antics provide a steady stream of fools’ gold.
Just for example, CNN recently carried 13 minutes of unfiltered Trump bombast awaiting a press conference to challenge his assertions. After he refused questions at the end, John King remarked, “We’ve been had.”
I first met King in 1990 when we covered the Gulf War for Associated Press. He was a tough reporter from South Boston. Journalists like him are seldom “had.”
CNN International purportedly focuses on world news. Mostly, like other U.S. networks, it doesn’t. People die of heat or wash away in floods across the planet. The big story is Americans with no air-conditioning or delayed rescue.
Black lives matter in America. Not so much from Sudan to the Congo and across West Africa, where conflict, famine and poverty set off human waves that Trumplicans think can be stopped with a permeable wall and more border guards.
Inflation, the overriding issue, is a global phenomenon. That’s Trump, not Biden, largely the result of a pandemic he mishandled, a Ukraine war he let happen and shameless price gouging by corporate executives who pour money into his campaign.
Finishing this piece, I spoke to a smart history major with no illusions about Trump. But he may not vote for Biden because he says the president condones Israeli overkill.
He is a senior at Kent State where in 1970 the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed students and wounded nine others during a protest over Vietnam. It was the extreme of sensible campus upheaval across the country over a senseless war.
Back then, only television footage and newspapers relayed student outrage. Today, it is flashed across the world in real time at the speed of Instagram.
Yes, he said, when I made the case detailed above, but many young people see two bad candidates unfit for office. “It comes down to a question of morality,” he concluded.
At this stage, few made-up minds are likely to change. November depends on persuading the persuadable to turn up at the polls.
The CNN debate is on June 27 at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Biden may sparkle as he did at his State of the Union address. Or not. Trump, obese and not much younger, is skipping preparation to wing it with ringmaster banter.
However much political analysts and TV commenters rabbit on about Biden’s appearance, what matters is substance, not physiognomy.
This may smack of a rant, but it is simply reporting observable fact. A second Trump term would bring world realities home to America. By then, it will likely be too late to avert the consequences.
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Interview with Christiane Amanpour
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/18/us/video/robert-c-o-brien-trump-amanpour-us-politics
Robert O’Brien’s article in Foreign Affairs
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-peace-strength-trump-obrien