Trump’s ‘Silent Majority’ Needs to Speak Up, Defend America

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20, 2020. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Commentary

President Donald Trump began his rally in Tulsa on June 20 by saying that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before.” I hope he’s right. I think he is. But the deep state/establishment response to the Tulsa rally reminds us that that silent majority will have to learn to speak up, and soon.

On the run-up to the rally, it was said that nearly a million people had tried to sign up for the event. On June 20, the auditorium, with a capacity of some 20,000, was only about half full. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and other prominent dispensers of fake news were ecstatic. “Trump gives grievance-filled speech to unfilled arena,” reported the Post. The rest of the anti-Trump press followed suit.

What happened? Did fears of the CCP virus keep people at home? Had Trump lost his mojo? No. Two things put a damper on attendance. First, thugs arrived in the hundreds to disrupt the event, causing the cancellation of the outdoors component.

More to the point, thousands of anti-Trumpers made reservations to attend but didn’t show up. But the New York Times headline informing us that that “TikTok Teens Say They Sank Trump Rally” is disingenuous. The rally wasn’t sunk. It was a rousing success. Look at the clips: It is clear that Trump’s fans loved it. It’s clear that Trump loved it, too.

The fake news said that the rally was sparsely attended. Compared to what? Local authorities estimated there were about 7,000 people attending. When Joe Biden delivered what was billed as a major economic speech outside Philadelphia a few days ago, he drew 20 people. Two-zero.

Biden’s speech was an automaton’s bad dream: boilerplate from beginning to end, recited as if by someone who knew what the words sounded like but had no sense of their meaning.

Trump’s speech crackled with energy, full of serious points and amusing asides. In the wake of his commencement speech at West Point on June 13, the media was full of stories about how frail Trump was, how he doddered slowly down the ramp from the stage, how he had to use two hands to take a drink of water.

Trump disposed of both charges in an off-the-cuff skit that was both hilarious and devastating to the media that twisted the episodes in an effort to damage the president.

Vandalizing History

But the speech wasn’t all laughs. Trump also made several serious points. Above all, he drew a sharp contrast between what he stood for—ordered liberty underwritten by the rule of law—and what the Democrats stand for: defunding the police, the destruction of our heritage, and the divisive triumph of identity politics and economic immiseration.

“The unhinged left wing mob is trying to vandalize our history,” Trump said, “desecrate our monuments ... tear down our statues and punish, cancel, and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control. We’re not conforming, that’s why we’re here, actually. This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive regime in its place. They want to defund and dissolve our police departments, think of that.”

Yes, think of that. In Minneapolis this weekend, where the police department is in a state of semi-paralysis, at least twelve people were shot, and at least one died.

“Joe Biden and the Democrats want to prosecute Americans for going to church, but not for burning a church,“ Trump said. ”They believe you can riot, vandalize and destroy, but you cannot attend a peaceful pro-America rally. They want to punish your thought, but not their violent crimes.” That way lies madness.

Going After Trump

In 2016, the press and the deep state apparat was almost uniformly anti-Trump. But they were also somewhat lackadaisical. Everyone knew that Trump was a joke. He was despicable, yes, but he couldn’t possibly win, so it wasn’t worth expending too much energy tearing him down. Early on, the Hillary Clinton campaign let it be known that they were doing what they could to boost Trump because they thought he would be the least challenging opponent.

This time, it’s different. They know what a formidable candidate Trump can be. Moreover, unlike the last time, Trump has the advantages of incumbency. In 2016, he was a political neophyte. Now he knows his way around the levers of power.

He also has an astonishing record to run on: nearly 300 federal judges nominated and confirmed, the transformation of America’s energy industry, tax cuts, a roll-back of the regulatory state, an extraordinary stock market, the revitalization of America’s military, the renaissance of American manufacturing, and a serious effort to do something about America’s borders. All this in spite of the national lockdown because of the latest Chinese import, the CCP virus.

There is also this: In complete contradistinction to Joe Biden, the more Trump can connect with the voters, the better he does. His rallies coin voters, which is why the left is determined to sabotage them.

The 2016 campaign was nasty. The 2020 campaign will be insane. Every organ of elite public opinion, all the megaphones of the deep state, every repository of woke culture—academia, Hollywood, HR departments of major corporations—all will be working overtime to destroy the foreign body that is Trump and all he stands up for: all us red-pill deplorables who embrace the America defined by the Founders—a country where government is limited and freedom and economic opportunity are paramount.

The left regards Trump as an existential threat, and they are right to. The attack they mount against him will be unprecedented in ferocity and underhandedness. There is no malign expedient they will not avail themselves of, no dirty trick to which they will not stoop.

Which is why the “silent majority” that the president invoked in his Tulsa rally can no longer remain silent. Just as Trump is an existential threat to the deep state and its culture of corruption, so too that establishment is an existential threat to America as conceived by the Founders, Lincoln, Reagan, and Trump. Toward the end of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great novel “The Leopard,” one of the main characters wryly notes that “if we want things to stay the same, a lot of things will have to change.”

The air of paradox is only superficial. “The choice in 2020,” as the president said on June 20, “is very simple. Do you want to bow before the left wing mob? Or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.