I watched Trump’s West Point commencement speech so you don’t have to

Donald Trump is a very dangerous man, and I’m going to tell you why: We are not taking him seriously enough.

The headlines I read today about Trump’s speech at West Point went like this: “Trump mocked for West Point speech,” and “Trump rambles about trophy wives” and “Trump battered after pathetic MAGA display at West Point” and “Trump’s ‘political rally’ West Point speech didn’t get his usual response.”

Number one, it wasn’t a “political rally” speech. It was a commencement speech – a Donald Trump commencement speech, to be sure, but it fit within the norms of the kind of speech given to graduates of a college on their commencement day. Number two, other than his wearing one of his ridiculous “Make America Great Again” hats, it wasn’t a MAGA rally of any kind. Number three, he didn’t get what CNN called his “usual response” because the parents and families were there to watch their sons and daughters graduate, and they couldn’t wait for him to get off the stage so their kids’ names could be called, and they could find their new lieutenants on the football field and celebrate. He got some applause for his usual punch lines – the biggest one when he said, “we won’t have men playing women’s sports anymore,” but the applause was brief and quickly died down as Trump stood there waiting with obvious disappointment for more, for cheering that didn’t come.

There was some polite applause by cadets…you could see it in wide shots…for classmates Trump called upon by name and for names of West Point generals like “Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf” and “George Patton”, but you couldn’t hear it because the cadets were wearing white cotton formal dress gloves. Try making noise wearing those.

Trump veered off into exaggerated political talk about his tariffs and his usual lies about winning the 2020 election, but he didn’t go on with his favorite string of lies as he usually does. He raised his voice expecting to get a big reaction with this one: “There will be no more ‘critical race theory’ or ‘transgender for everybody’ forced onto our brave men and women in uniform or anybody else, for that matter, in our country.” But there was only scattered applause from the audience in the stands, all families of graduates, and none from the cadets.

He did tell a much longer story than most reports recounted about William Levitt, the man who built Levittown on Long Island, and how he “made a lot of money,” and divorced his wife and got a “trophy wife.” “Can we say trophy wife?” Trump asked rhetorically, answering himself with “I guess we can say a trophy wife.” He went on and on about Levitt, telling the cadets how revolutionary Levitt’s suburban development was, and how he would go to building sites after work had stopped for the day and “pick up nails and screws and scraps of wood” so they could be used the next day. It was hard to tell where Trump was going with his overly long and detailed story, that included a bit about finding Levitt in the corner of a “Fifth Avenue party” Trump was invited to because he was “successful,” and discovering that Levitt, whom he had admired, was a broken man. And then Levitt tells him he was bankrupt and friendless because “I lost my momentum.”

That’s what it was all about for Trump – momentum. He swung the story around to the cadets by saying “you can’t lose your momentum” in the military. None of the reports about the Trump speech mentioned that part, which happens to be true. It’s taught at West Point, how important momentum is in battle. Every cadet there had studied momentum in tactics. So, with his seemingly endless story about William Levitt, Trump actually had a point that was relevant to his audience, the cadets, and to the day of their graduation and commissioning as officers. He told the story the way he understood the subject, momentum, and it was relevant. Momentum was important in business to Trump, and it’s important in the military, and he made his point in a very Trumpian way, but he made it.

What makes Trump dangerous is the way the liberal press and commentators mock him for his Trumpiness, for want of a better word. I have two points about that: first, he is who he is, he did come out of the New York City real estate world, so what other frame of reference do you think he would have? And two, his story about Levitt was probably the one thing he really got across to those cadets. He did admire Levitt, and the part of the story about Trump going up to talk to him in the corner of a big party on Fifth Avenue was, heaven forbid, kind of touching, and it came across that way.

The point I’m making is that, he is who he is, and he figured out a way to sell himself as who he is to a broad swath of the American public – broad enough to get elected to the presidency twice, and coming very close the third time. He did it with the kind of self-referential stories he told at West Point. They worked politically in his campaigns, and they worked today at West Point because, God help us, he’s good at it.

We don’t like his grievance-heavy self-promoting and his golf stories – he managed to work one of those in, too, in a section referring to West Point sports teams – but he made the golf story work, too.

It does us no good to constantly be mocking and making fun of Trump for his Trumpiness. Although it doesn’t appeal to us, it appeals to people we need on our side if we’re going to win political campaigns in the future, not only at the national level for the presidency and the Congress, but on the state and county and town levels around the country. We have to understand why Trump can make his act work, and how he does it. We don’t need to replicate it with some kind of modified Democratic version, and we shouldn’t. But we need to understand how Trump does it and constantly mocking him doesn’t do anything for Democrats or liberals, or any Americans, when it comes right down to it.

I’m not saying we should leave it alone when he goes off the handle with “transgender for everybody,” and we shouldn’t ignore the kind of statements he makes that are just wrong, and off the wall, like his failure to understand how stealth technology works with combat aircraft, which he showcased again today.

One of the commentators today made an entire case that, as his headline said, “Trump is senile.” Others are saying similar things, some people are even comparing Trump and Joe Biden and trying to say that Trump is worse off cognitively than Biden is reported to have been in the new Tapper book. None of this is helpful. Trump didn’t appear “senile” in his debate with Biden. He didn’t appear senile at West Point giving his commencement address, that went on for more than an hour.

And whether he is somewhat cognitively impaired or not doesn’t matter, because Republicans aren’t going to do shit about it if he is.

So rather than pointing fingers at Trump and mocking him and trying to catch his every verbal misstep and blow it out of proportion, the way reporting on Trump’s West Point speech did today, we need to confront what he does with the powers of presentation that he does have, and how he does it.

As he has shown us for more than 10 years, he is a considerable opponent. He wants to do terrible things to this country, and if we’re going to stop him, or hinder his progress, or wound him in any way, we need to take this man and his talents seriously. Failing to do this serves no purpose and is damaging to our ability to counter him.