Newspaper Reader comments.
Apr 09, 2025
Headline: There’s Nothing Real About Trump’s ‘Real America’
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I’ve been thinking about this case as an emblem of everything that makes Donald Trump’s presidency so vile and destructive, even when I’ve bent over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even when I’ve agreed with him on this or that point of policy.
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I have, to borrow a line from Peggy Noonan, a “certain idea of America.” He ain’t it.
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It’s Sojourner Truth asking the suffragists at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?
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It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
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It’s Gail Halvorsen, the candy bomber of the Berlin Airlift, parachuting chocolates and gum to the hungry children of the besieged city.
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It’s John McCain refusing an offer to be released before other American P.O.W.s in North Vietnamese captivity — and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “an Arab.”
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It’s Robert F. Kennedy after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”
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It’s George H.W. Bush after lightning victory in the Persian Gulf war: “This is not a time of euphoria, certainly not a time to gloat.”
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Democratic nobility is also found on a page I keep in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that brought my 10-year-old mother to the United States, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Right below my mother’s name and nationality — “Stateless” — there is Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also stateless.
Soon to be Americans all.
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understatement and confidence, decency and expectation, the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
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But I struggle to understand what’s real in JD Vance’s shape-shifting political beliefs or Trump’s meme coins.
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Editor: this selective collection of quotations, in sum these lifeless tableau vivant , are the sighposts of a decorus chatter, that is an attempt to mitigate, excuse the Genocide being perptrated against the Palestinian’s, by the Zionist Faschist State. Onley in high dudgeon can Mr Stephens manage to command, what almost resembles the moral/political high ground!
The United States is a vast and diverse country and an old and resilient democracy that won’t quickly fold into authoritarianism and illiberalism the way Russia or Hungary did. The habits of freedom, 250 years old, still run deep in our bones — deeper than anything this president can ruin over the next few years. But that certain idea of America that once typified us, and for which we were once so admired, is evaporating.
Newspaper Reader.
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