Donald Trump’s Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore was a call to arms to take on the evil mob destroying our beloved country’s values. It was a thunderous condemnation of the political left, and a promise to seize the country from the “totalitarian” proponents of “social justice” who are destroying our culture of “free and open debate,” replacing it with “cancel culture and speech codes”:

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished… One of their political weapons is “Cancel Culture” — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America. This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.

Trump’s picture of what is going on in the country is totally detached from reality. Totalitarianism involves guns and concentration camps. The “radical left” in the United States has two members of Congress, Bernie Sanders and AOC. (Perhaps Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.) This is the same conservative persecution complex we have heard for decades; some of the richest and most powerful people in the world complaining that the “far left” are totalitarians. The left is permanently tarred as Stalinist thought police trying to put dissenters in the gulag—even as the contemporary left is trying to dismantle both police and prisons and reduce the power of the carceral state.

It should be clear what’s going on here. Trump’s much-vaunted economy has tanked. Well over 100,000 people have died of coronavirus and cases are on the rise. 8 out of 10 people report that they are dissatisfied with the direction the country is going, and Joe Biden is outpolling Trump consistently. Americans have only gotten more sympathetic to immigrants over time, so he can’t run on scapegoating Mexicans like he did in 2016. Trump has one approach left: try to reignite the culture wars and convince people that a censorious PC left is trying to destroy our freedom.