What Trump, unlike some other Republicans, appears to have understood is that the Black Lives Matter movement is not just a campaign to stop African Americans being persecuted and killed by the police. It is a political campaign with sweeping ambitions; revolutionary goals that would never have the support of the general public. The Democrats, and quite a few Republicans, have bended their knees to a movement which, in its manifesto, vows to ‘disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ and in its place ‘foster a queer-affirming network.’…

These are just words, of course, and many Americans will wonder if Trump is able to live up to his rhetoric. With the coronavirus and the riots, Trump has seemed powerless. He has let many cities burn, chastising local authorities for their inaction but not using his executive powers to take control. He stressed last night that he was stopping the carnage — ‘and quickly’. He pointed to his new executive order that will mean 10 years in prison for anyone who damages or defaces a federal statue and that the ‘suspected ringleader’ of the attack on the statue of Andrew Jackson in Washington, DC had been arrested. Too little, too late, some might say. Yet Trump is on stronger ground when he points to deep-rooted self-hatred of America’s progressives.

‘Our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains,’ he said. ‘The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.’