On America’s 250th, Mamdani called for unity – while Trump rewrote the past
For The Guardian, I wrote about the dueling speeches between Mayor Mamdani of New York City and US President Donald Trump that took place over this anniversary weekend. The New York mayor faced a ‘nation of contradictions’ while the president offered a stump speech.
If Donald Trump’s address on 3 July from Mount Rushmore will be remembered at all, it will be because that was the day of competing speeches, and competing visions, of the United States. Earlier on 3 July, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, delivered a speech that was about half as long as Trump’s 28-minute address, but one that offered a far different assessment of the challenges facing his city and our nation.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” Mamdani said, while seated at George Washington’s desk and flanked by newly naturalized American citizens. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world – one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”
Mamdani’s speech was rich with historical references, beginning with his mention of the Lenape people who lived on the land of what we now call New York City before the Europeans arrived. (As far as I know, Trump never mentions the Indigenous nations of this land.) Mamdani’s address made a (too) brief nod to American chattel slavery, before celebrating American immigration, noting: “Irish immigrants [who] arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty” along with “Jewish people escaping pogroms”.
Next, it offered a sharp warning that the nation must not lose its way. “Those ideals upon which our nation was built – they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them,” the mayor said. “Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America – the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.”
By their nature, these types of speeches are flavored with more than a dash of national self-flattery. And while Mamdani’s speech was clearly situated in the conflicts of our present political moment, his rhetoric was nevertheless unifying and optimistic. The latter half of Trump’s 3 July address and parts of his 4 July address were basically a stump speech for Republicans, as they face a tough midterm election season ahead.
Trump, clearly rattled by the success of the left wing of the Democratic party in New York and across the country, has decided to return to the 1950s. He is now brazenly resurrecting cold war rhetoric, repeatedly labeling his opponents “godless communists”, as he did on Friday.
Trump delivered yet another speech on 4 July and in Washington DC. This address, besides being almost rained out, felt more like a strange mix of a State of the Union address and a 1970’s gameshow, as Trump kept wheeling out old flags and centenarian veterans on to his stage as if they were all up for auction. Human and non-human props aside, his actual Fourth of July lecture offered, perhaps surprisingly, less substance than the one he had given the day before.
But democratic socialists are clearly not the “godless communists” Trump claims. Take our mayor, for example. Since Mamdani is a Muslim and a democratic socialist, he would be a Muslim communist and not a godless one. Please get it right, Mr President. Of course, the whole “godless communists” thing is pure fiction, but, as Trump well knows, it’s easier to fight the enemy who lives in your imagination than your actual opponent challenging you at the polls…
Read the rest here.