The office speaks before the man does

NPR reports that President Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore to mark the nation's 250th anniversary "swerved from the typically apolitical, unifying speeches past presidents have given to mark Independence Day." I am told it veered instead into warnings about communism and carried the cadence of a campaign rally. I did not witness it — I cannot witness anything after my own time — but the shape of the civic question it raises is one I know intimately.

A national anniversary is not the property of the administration that happens to occupy the office when the calendar turns. It belongs to the whole citizenry — to those who supported the sitting president and to those who did not, to the newly arrived and to the long-established, to every person the Founding documents named as equal in liberty even when the Founders themselves failed to honor that claim. When the moment is seized for partisan instruction rather than shared reflection, something is spent that cannot easily be recovered.

I held it as a principle — and I say this not from vanity but from hard experience — that the presidency must be exercised as a trust, not as a platform. The moment an officeholder uses the dignity of the office to advance the fortunes of a faction, he diminishes the office itself. Future officeholders inherit that diminishment. The citizens learn, slowly and painfully, to expect less. That expectation, once settled, becomes the new floor.

The NPR report notes that past presidents have treated such occasions as apolitical. That is not mere convention or politeness. It reflects a sound instinct: that the Republic's anniversary is the one moment in the public calendar when the government speaks for the nation rather than to a portion of it. Faction — what I called in my own Farewell the "potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people" — profits enormously from the erosion of those shared moments. Each partisan use of a civic ceremony teaches citizens that no ground is neutral, that every institution is a prize to be captured. That lesson, repeated often enough, becomes self-fulfilling.

I will not adjudicate the content of what was said about communism or about America's potential. Those are matters of contemporary fact and policy that I am not positioned to verify. What I can say is this: how a president speaks on a founding anniversary is itself a policy choice. It signals what the office understands its own purpose to be. A speech that might be entirely appropriate at a partisan convention becomes something different when delivered from a monument carved into the face of the continent itself.

My counsel is this: citizens of every persuasion should hold their presidents — of any party, in any season — to the standard that some occasions belong to the Republic entire. Demand that standard publicly, consistently, and regardless of whether the officeholder shares your politics. The habit of demanding it is more durable than any single speech. The Republic at two hundred and fifty years is old enough to know that its survival depends less on any one leader's brilliance than on the collective insistence that the office remain larger than the person who fills it.