Acting President Donald Trump has not decided where he will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president two weeks from now. Trump having bungled/sabotaged/forfeited the national response to the coronavirus, the pandemic has raged all year. By now, 165,000 Americans are dead with millions infected and both major party conventions largely virtual.
Trump suggested he might give his speech from the White House lawn, placing executive branch staffers and cabinet members at legal risk for Hatch Act violations. (Not that he cares.) Should that location prove too problematic, Trump suggested using the Gettysburg battlefield from which President Abraham Lincoln gave his famous address.
I like the Gettysburg idea. The Devil’s Den below Little Round Top seems fitting. Or if that spot is too inaccessible, Trump could speak from Seminary Ridge where Gen. Robert E. Lee launched Pickett’s Charge effectively ending the Confederacy.
After over a century and a half, the nation is still processing the legacy of the Civil War. The North won that war, but the South won Reconstruction. Defeated Southerners imposed Jim Crow on freed slaves, reestablishing white domination for another hundred years enforced through a reign of terror. Monuments erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to whitewash treason as a noble fight for states’ rights (the “cult of the lost cause”) are only lately coming down across the country. America just laid to rest Rep. John Lewis of Georgia who was beaten unconscious by Alabama state troopers at Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 in the fight to overturn Jim Crow. The Edmund Pettus Bridge there still bears the name of a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
Trump’s revanchism, his racism, his know-nothingism, and his contempt for democratic rule is the end-product of half a century of movement conservatism and white reactionaries’ response to the election of the country’s first black president one hundred and forty-three years after the end of the Civil War. trump speaking from the deathbed of the Confederacy would be a fitting coda to enduring institutional racism, and long overdue. Let his presidency and the Confederacy die once and for all.
Tuesday night, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, former Vice President Joe Biden, announced his pick of running mate: Senator Kamala Harris of California. Her mother from India and her father from Jamaica, Harris represents a transition from the elite, white male culture that has controlled this country for its entire history.
The transition that began with the Civil War and took a hiatus for 100 years advanced again with the Civil Rights movement and passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It took nearly half a century more before Barack Obama won the presidency. Biden offers himself not as a breakthrough figure, but as a transitional president: racial, cultural, and generational. The left may feel the transition is not coming fast enough, but whatever policy faults it finds in Biden and Harris, Obama’s vice president recognizes change in this country is inevitable, desirable, and essential to progress. There is no turning back. There is no great “again.”
David Von Drehle of the Washington Post gives us a taste of what a Trump acceptance speech might sound like delivered from the Confederate side of the Gettysburg battlefield:
“Four score and seven years ago. Not everyone knows a score. People ask me, they say, ‘What’s a score?’ Fauci the other day. What’s a score? Not everyone knows. The score is the best it’s ever been. Under Trump, 87. Under Obama, not so much.
“Eighty-seven tremendous, tremendous years ago — and some years that were not so great, frankly — our fathers brought forth; also the mothers, the great suburban mothers. Biden wants to take away their dream. Our fathers and our mothers brought forth a new nation. How they did it: not so good. Not so perfect. A lot of people got hurt. Some were bad people, but a lot of them were good. The king of England, not everyone agrees he was so bad, but now they have a queen. Very few people know this.
“Someone told me Thomas Jefferson ate by himself at the White House and was the smartest one ever. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I frankly think my IQ — people tell me it is tremendous. The doctors see and they can’t believe it. They say, ‘Mr. President, this is unbelievable!’ It’s called a ‘cognitive test.’ Biden’s afraid to take it. Sleepy Joe.
“My people, the best people, they tell me Thomas Jefferson made a good deal when he bought Louisiana, the great state of Louisiana, for 3 cents an acre. I say he must have read my book.
It is time to close the book on Trump’s misrule and on the anti-American zombie culture behind him. It was over a century and a half ago.
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