The N.Y. Times called President Trump's Mt. Rushmore Independence Day address "leaning into the culture wars."

For once the Times got a story right, although its characterization wasn't intended to be a compliment.  The Times believes that its Leninist/Maoist cultural revolution is just; any attempt at attenuating it is immoral.

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump surrounded the Democrats with a culture war siege that will rival Grant's siege of Vicksburg in 1863.

YouTube screen grab.

Trump let COVID-19 public health bullies paralyze the country, and cripple his presidency, but he knew that COVID-19 would pass soon enough.  Trump is among us who believed that the majority of Americans would shake off the irrational anxiety over how the virus-phobia has interrupted their lives and livelihoods.  We just didn't think their somnolence would be slapped awake by the Democrats' war against them, in the streets, in the corporate boardrooms, in college and university trustee enclaves, in Democrat state houses, and in the nation's capitol on the left side of the aisles.

Those same Americans in the past six weeks have seen, and many experienced firsthand, American cities attacked, firebombed, burned, and looted by ruthless leftist mobs, police neutered, law and order dismantled by Democrat elected officials — along with monuments to American history.

Six hundred Americans have been murdered as collateral victims, suburbia and small towns endangered as the next battleground for leftist anarchists once they secure inner cities as unlivable caliphates of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.  Americans know that the left's assault on America is not an abstraction, nor a talking point, but real, bordering on unvarnished terror.

COVID-19, whatever its unwelcome toll, is a flyspeck compared to the destruction of this nation, being played out 24/7.

The destruction of this nation is frighteningly real, and Americans have been wary that Trump would not engage in the fight to rescue it, leaving them to the unmerciful whims of tyrannical mobs abetted by lawless Democrats.  No longer.

The Democrats Hate America First agenda is forcibly, indeed violently, erasing and obliterating American literacy, intending to supplant American exceptionalism with a totalitarian socialist revolution.  Trump calls this the existential threat to the Republic, eclipsing all other perils, overriding all other issues, which if not permanently disabled will extinguish all hopes and aspirations outlined in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration, which will not be defended anywhere else on the globe.

No one is inoculated or otherwise immune from this madness.  Nearly everybody knows it.  And everyone knows who the enemy is.  Only Trump has the pulpit and the courage to speak for all of us whose voices, and freedoms have been marginalized, belittled, quashed, disrespected, disenfranchised, and forbidden.

Trump identified the Democrats as the enemy and itemized the consequences to our way of life, liberties, fortunes, and pathways to prosperity if that enemy wins.

The N.Y. Sun editorial put it this way:

"Mr. Trump reprised the logic of American liberty — rights given by God, and therefore inalienable. Then he warned of "a growing danger" that threatens the blessings "our ancestors fought so hard for." He called it a "merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children . . . " Here the audience started to boo such defamation.

"Angry mobs," the president continued, "are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities." He reckoned that many of them "have no idea why they are doing this, but some know exactly what they are doing." They think, Mr Trump said, that the American people are "weak and soft and submissive."

"His vow was that the American people "will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them." At this point the audience was chanting "USA!" Mr. Trump then laced into "cancel culture," which he called "driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees." He called it "completely alien to our culture and our values."

Trump knows that that his message about jobs, illegal immigration, America first economics, and fundamental liberties is being crushed by the Democrats' Hate America First platform.

Thus, the only re-election strategy that matters is for Trump to extinguish the Democrat inferno that threatens everything that is good, just, and enduring — jobs, liberty, dignity, prosperity.

And the N.Y. Sun aptly noted that Trump now has the winning message, while all of the Democrats have said nothing and must now be on the defensive for their collusion, and assent to destroying the nation:

It would be one thing were any of the major Democrats saying such things. The cat, though, has got their tongues. Not a peep of support from, say, Vice President Biden or Speaker Pelosi or even Governor Cuomo or Mayor de Blasio, nor such vice presidential contenders as Senators Harris and Warren. Five weeks into this uprising, and Mr. Trump has scooped them all — and marked that the Democrats are part of the problem[.]

Roger Kimball at American Greatness has an additional nugget about Trump's message on moral justice:

"The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of Social Justice," he said. "But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance, and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination, and exclusion." 

Trump must now stay the course, surgically excising the Democrat-inspired malignancies, reminding voters that neither Joe Biden nor anyone else with a D beside his name will make America safe and livable.  Instead Dems will create a vast wasteland, formerly the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever seen.

Trump made this campaign a choice.  Between optimism and despair.  Between dignity and dispossession.  Between Trump's America — liberty, freedom, security, justice equitably applied, and prosperity — or the Democrats' reign of lawlessness, neo-segregation, poverty, and deprivation — the end of the American dream.