President Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night was both a second-term statement of intent and a stunning piece of political theater.
And what difference a play makes.
“America is back,” the headliner announced. He kept saying it for the next 90-plus minutes.
Trump is on a mission to “revive the righteous cause of American liberty,” jumpstart a new age of “American marvels” and plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars.
To infinity and beyond: Trump’s feel-good buzz is light-years away from the slurs and stumbles of the hoarse whisperer Joe Biden, let alone the halfwit hectoring and contrived cackling of Kamala Harris.
For in some dismal parallel universe, it was President Harris, not President Trump, who was at the podium on Tuesday night.
But the real stars of the speech were in the balcony.
The mother and sister of Laken Riley, a nursing student who went out for a jog one morning and was murdered by an illegal immigrant.
The wife and daughters of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who died shielding them from the gunman’s bullets at Trump’s rally in Butler, Penn.
Elliston Berry, a 15-year-old girl victimized by “deep fake” cyberbullying at school.
Stephanie Diller, whose police officer husband Jonathan was murdered at a traffic stop in Queens by a repeat offender.
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” Thucydides wrote.
The Democrats did whatever they wanted.
The suffering fell not only on the weakest, on women and children.
It also fell on the strong, like Jonathan Diller.
Like Roberto Ortiz, the Navy veteran who gets shot at by the cartels when he is on Border Patrol duty on the Rio Grande.
The Democrats have taken liberties with the trust of the American people.
Trump wants to restore the social contract.
The Democrats are so out of touch that they still cannot understand why Trump would do it.
The answer, like most things about him, is very simple and also pretty complex.
Trump is a patriot. He loves his country. He wants Americans to be happy.
These are simple notions, far too simple for college professors and CNN pundits to comprehend.
But they run deep.
At heart, patriotism is a passion, the kind of irrationality that bureaucrats fear and dictators covet.
The Democrats suppressed, censored and stigmatized this natural passion.
Trump understands that a nation is a big family.
We rise or fall together.
No wonder that within three weeks of his inauguration, Rasmussen’s pollsters reported that for the first time in 20 years, a plurality of Americans believe the country is “on the right track.”
That measure is the only one that matters.
It’s not about party loyalty, whatever the parties claim.
It’s about the fate of the nation.
As George Orwell said, “My country, right or left.”
A government is a bureaucratic machine. A “society” is a sociological abstraction.
Fireworks and fly-bys are fun, but they are just symbols.
A nation is made of people.
The American nation is a third of a billion individuals, all out for themselves but also — and more importantly — all in this together.
We should not be ashamed of these simple and important truths.
They are the wisdom of the ages.
They are the founding truths of constitutions and nations.
They connect the core of our affiliations, family and faith, to the wider circles of duty and responsibility that bind a nation.
To see what happens when government overrides these realities with ideology, look at the disaster that is England.
Mass immigration and political correctness have destroyed the compact between the rulers and the ruled.
In January, a YouGov poll found that 38% of Brits under the age of 40 would refuse to answer the call to enlist in the event of a world war.
The Democrats enforced a similar madness on the American people: a denial of the basics.
Trump restates the simple truths:
The world is a cruel place.
A state cannot stand without borders.
A nation will disintegrate if illegal immigration continues.
A democracy cannot serve its citizens if non-citizens can vote and the courts are corrupted.
A man cannot become a woman.
Fix these foundations, and the American people will do the rest.
Trump summoned “a country of doers, dreamers, fighters, survivors” to embrace the future.
There is a nation to rebuild, a world to repair, and no time to lose.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
