Blue State Blues: Trump’s Fourth of July Speech Was Patriotism over Politics

President Donald Trump did more than defy his critics with his memorable Fourth of July address from the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday evening.

He likely established what will become an annual tradition — one later presidents, decades from now, will continue to observe.

And he gave the American people the tribute that we have long deserved, but which we have somehow been unable, until now, to give ourselves, too afraid to pass along to the next generation.

The president’s opponents said that his revamped Fourth of July celebrations smacked of authoritarianism. They said that the ceremonial use of tanks in a parade, as well as the flyovers from every branch of the U.S. armed forces, were somehow un-American — even though they had certainly been used before.

They said it was the height of narcissism for Trump to deliver a speech on Independence Day, that he would be turning the day into campaign commercial.

Former vice president Joe Biden said, prior to the speech, that the event had been “designed more to stroke Trump’s ego than celebrate American ideals.” (This from a politician who served under Barack Obama, who not only made virtually every speech about himself, but dared to re-design the presidential seal in his own image.)

Biden could not have been more wrong. Trump’s speech was all about the country — its heroes, its people, and its democratic ideals.

Trump, in the rain, addressed the nation and re-told the heroic story of its founding. “With a single sheet of parchment, and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history,” Trump said, recalling the battles that followed to secure the...

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