The Optics Matter. And Trump Won.

NY Mayor Mamdani didn’t have a chance.

Oh sure, he confiscated George Washington’s desk from which to spew hatred for America. It only made him look small and insignificant next to the legacy he was trying to co-opt. Mamdani’s only job before mayor was to serve in the state Assembly. ‘Democratic Socialists Who Failed At Life Are Weaponizing Envy,’ said the Federalist.

President Trump had the backdrops. And he nailed their symbolism.

At the new Teddy Roosevelt Library in the Badlands of North Dakota, Trump arrived by train to greet a crowd of cheering fans in Medora and was escorted up to the library by a horseback-riding cavalry of cowboys dressed as the Rough Riders. TR’s triumph at San Juan Hill made America a world power. His decision to build the Panama Canal and his insistence on a fierce male vitality make him a natural fit for Trump. When Trump talked to an AI-driven TR, well, image became reality.

“Freedom is not a gift that lasts long in the hands of cowards,” TR had said. Trump said he liked the line so much he wanted to steal it.

The next day Trump was at Mount Rushmore. Given the president’s ego — and his ambition — it wasn’t long before he and others were suggesting someday he would join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln on that majestic mountain. Trump used his speech not only to praise our revolutionary founders but to warn against those who seek to topple the very society these men created. Here he laid down the gauntlet against communism.

Calling the founding “the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on the planet,” he warned against “a resurgence of the communist menace,” and vowed that America “will never be a communist country.” Efforts to “erase our heritage,” to “alienate us from our history,” to “topple the heroes of 1776,” he said, will not succeed.

And then there was the finale. Plagued by thunderstorms, a crowd was directed to take cover at government agencies — surely the first time in history these buildings proved useful to the people who paid for them. At the US Department of Agriculture — where the joke holds there is one staffer for every farmer — Americans broke into a spontaneous rendition of our National Anthem.

It was nearing midnight when the president finished speaking, outlining the many themes of the long weekend — that communism is like a cancer that has to be stopped in its tracks early, and that “our destiny is written by God.”

Then, they went off — some 850,000 munitions decorating the skies of the nation’s capital. Biggest, baddest, rebuttal to all the blue mayors and governors who canceled their events. The Second Unitarian Meeting House in Nantucket canceled its annual reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights so congregants could “ponder their own whiteness.” Maybe they should have pondered their liberty.

America250 was rescued from a cabal of NGOs slated to run the show if Kamala Harris had won. Their plans included wrapping the holiday in a kind of soft FDR socialism. Left-wing protestors tried to parrot the talking points but they fell flat. Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground terrorist, former Obama adviser — kept saying ‘F… America!’ And from across the pond, left-wing historian and podcaster Dominic Sandbrook welcomed his guest Ken Burns “on the 250th anniversary of a tax rebellion in the American colonies.” A tax rebellion! He asked Burns why America rebelled. “Land,” said the sage of PBS. Not freedom. Not liberty. Not freedom. Stolen land!

Thanks to President Trump’s intervention, instead America250 became an opportunity to forestall a communist takeover of America by angry people who hate the very things that make this country special — the opportunities to succeed, to live the American dream, to fulfill the promise of exceptionalism, blessed by Providence.

Our president met the moment with an understanding of both beauty and history. Our branding expert gets symbols. He cleaned the Reflecting Pool, forcing crazed leftists to come out in favor of algae. He put up a cage so the UFC could host its epic fights on the White House lawn. And he rescued statues of heroes toppled by 2020 rioters.

My favorite was Caesar Rodney, who, while in great pain from skin cancer, rode his horse 80 miles from Delaware to Philadelphia to cast a vote. His state’s delegation was split on whether to vote for independence. Rodney’s vote made the difference. He had been torn down because … well, George Floyd, languishing ever since in a storage unit in Delaware. After Trump recovered the statue of him riding atop his horse and replanted it in DC, ABC reported the news by calling Rodney “a controversial figure.”

In a 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic” — delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris — Teddy Roosevelt celebrated action and resilience over criticism from the sidelines.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

How lucky we are to have a man who is actually in the arena, unafraid of sweat and blood, who keeps getting up after his critics try to eliminate him.