A candidate’s closing argument, or last speech before the election, can be revealing. Who can forget Obama’s ringing declaration that his victory in 2008 would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
The speech that Donald Trump delivered last Thursday in West Palm Beach will be studied for years by political scientists trying to understand the Trump phenomenon. Regardless of the election outcome, there has never been a speech like it in American political history.
Appearing before thousands of cheering supporters at the South Florida Fairgrounds, Trump began his address by defining his campaign as a movement: “Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment, with a new government controlled by you, the American people.”
With the understanding that his movement is on the verge of becoming a new party in America, Trump then unloaded a fierce attack on the corrupt leadership of both political parties. “The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exist for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.”
“As an example, just one single trade deal they’d like to pass involves trillions of dollars, controlled by many countries, corporations and lobbyists.” We saw how that worked after then-Senator Obama promised in 2008 that he would “renegotiate NAFTA,” then renounced that pledge as soon as he moved into the White House.
“The political establishment that is trying to stop us,” Trump continued, “is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities. The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories, and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries all around the world.”
By an ironic coincidence, a few days before Trump’s speech, Britain’s Financial Times newspaper reported, “The world’s economic elite spent this week invoking fears of the existential crisis facing globalization while avoiding any mention of Donald Trump by name.” Bloomberg followed with a similar story that “The emergence of Donald Trump as a political force reflects a mood of growing discontent about immigration and globalization.”
“The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”
That was a reference to Hillary’s $225,000 speech to South American bankers on May 16, 2013. Hillary told her appreciative audience that her “dream” was to have completely “open trade and open borders” throughout the entire Western hemisphere.
Hillary’s anti-Americanism includes her record of favors for the outsourcing firm Tata, which exploited the H-1B visa system to replace tens of thousands of Americans with guest workers from India. Tata gave money to the Clinton Foundation, participated in the Clinton Global Initiative, and Hillary declared “I am delighted to be the Senator from Punjab as well as from New York.”
Trump then turned his attention to “the most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons,” namely the press. “Let’s be clear on one thing,” Trump continued, “the corporate media in our country is a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a political agenda, and their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Trump reminded his supporters that they are part of a worldwide uprising against the globalist elite. “We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government, and global trade deals, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations.”
“But the central base of world political power,” Trump said, “is right here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself.”
“The corrupt establishment knows that we are a great threat to their criminal enterprise,” Trump concluded. “They know that if we win their power is gone. But, it all depends on whether we let the corrupt media decide our future, or whether we let the American people decide our future.”
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6.
