Seeing the country through foreign eyes

Senator Claude Malhuret rose in the French Senate, and delivered an excoriation of the corrupt fever that has taken hold of the American government, and turned it in an instant from a flawed light in the world to a dangerous menace.

Donald Trump is exactly what I have told you he is. I want you to listen to the words of a senator from America’s first friend — the nation that helped us win our independence, where American soldiers fought and died and are buried under the watchful eyes of our French allies.

When Senator Malhuret speaks, he does so in the language of Lafayette. While he denounces the American regime and the insanity at hand he reaches out to the American people with whom he knows are the rock upon which Donald will crash to pieces. Listen to his condemnations of Trump’s weakness and dishonor:

Let me tell you a story.

The American experiment had endured for nearly 50 years when the last surviving major general of the Continental Army who had won American independence travelled to each of the 24 states of the Union to say farewell.

When the great tour was over, John Quincy Adams, the 6th president of the United States of America, ordered the United States Ship Brandywine, a 44 gun heavy frigate of the young US Navy to bring him home.

The name had great meaning. The warship was rechristened for the bloody battle in which the old general had bled for American independence.

He would sail home to France under the American flag into which he breathed life with American guns at the ready.

The American Union was thriving and growing. The political system invented by the Revolutionary generation had endured.

Power had been transferred peacefully between political competitors and factions for almost 30 years amidst all manner of turmoil, disagreements and whiffs of rebellion.

The Missouri Compromise, which could not, and would not hold, was four years old, and the debate over the evil of slavery was front and center in American life.

America was becoming, straining, growing, evolving and remembering with the deepest gratitude the great gift it had been given by men like Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Montier.

He was a one name superstar in 1824-1825 America. The Marquis de Lafayette was America’s first and greatest friend.

He was no friend of slavery and he foresaw its end, if not the violence that ended it. He was a philosopher who knew violence, cruelties, suffering and despotism.

America’s founding sin would not be solved philosophically or by reason, but rather by a spasm of bloodshed that lay ahead — and if not unimagined, was incomprehensible in its totality.

The grandchildren of the Americans who suffered, died, starved and were freed during that war — black and white — would become the core of the first American Army to leave American shores in 1917 and fight in Europe.

When it arrived in France, the American battalion marched on July 4, 1917, to Lafayette’s grave under the command of Colonel Charles Stanton, who famously said, “Lafayette, nous voilà.” (“Lafayette, we are here.”)

Among those American soldiers were the Harlem hell fighters who brought jazz to Europe.

They fueled the Harlem renaissance when they returned home, having tasted dignity and decency for the first time in a foreign land. The civil rights movement of 20th century America had a seed planted in French soil that blossomed in America.

Lafayette had prophesied the ending of slavery, but more.

He said this of the young America: “The perpetual union of the United States. It has always saved us in times of storm; one day it will save the world.”

The Children of the American Expeditionary Forces, who arrived in France in 1917, would become known as the Greatest Generation.

They liberated France and saved the world.

Many of them — like the 41st president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush — were born exactly 100 years after Lafayette arrived in America for his farewell.

When American independence was won at Yorktown, Lafayette was there. He understood the magnitude of the event.

“Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country,” he said.

It was human civilization’s before and after event. It ruptured history. It began a new epoch of mankind and human civilization.

This is what Lafayette understood so clearly.

He foresaw the end of slavery and colonialism as certain, and set in motion by the birth of the United States. He also accurately predicted America, and specifically the Deep South, would be among the last places on Earth to abandon the abominable practice.

Wherever Lafayette went in 1824-25, he was greeted by vast crowds of ebullient and grateful Americans. When he arrived in New York Harbor, he was greeted by the old Revolutionary War veterans who were quickly dying out.

He took one look around at New York and the scene around him and burst into tears.

He would meet with veterans of the War of 1812, including black troops who fought under Andrew Jackson in Louisiana.

He would be overcome with emotion many times on the trip, such as when he descended into the crypt where George Washington lay, to pay his respects to the man who was his commander, friend and inspiration. Lafayette had named his son George Washington Lafayette.

His visit to the African Free School, founded in part by his friend Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the recently refurbished Independence Hall, were epic events in the young country.

Independence Hall had fallen into disrepair because the US capital was in Washington, DC. It was renovated and fixed for Lafayette to use as his office, and he was delighted to be in the place where so many of his friends had signed the Declaration of Independence.

At this time, the country had found itself roiling in a grubby and vicious political campaign between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

The nation’s newspapers were filled with vituperations and accusations as northern and southern interests began to collide with ever increasing intensity.

Even then, the contours of American society’s fixed positions and trench lines were being carved like mountain valleys by the glacier of slavery and racial animus.

When the election was decided in the US House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, Lafayette was overjoyed to see Andrew Jackson take a stage, and congratulate the new president with goodwill and good wishes.

The experiment was succeeding. It has never not been fragile.

Lafayette was a contented man. He believed that the spread of human freedom was inexorable. He believed he had advanced it, and was content that there was unfurnished work in the spread of freedom that he would not live to see.

He was similar to Martin Luther King in that regard. Both men shared an incandescent faith about the inevitability of justice and freedom at the end of a long and inevitable arc.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on America’s 50th birthday. They had reconciled. The United States was brought together by an epic visit and journey by a great friend.

He reminded a nation of what it had in common, where it had come from, and where it was going. The visit marked the passing of an era and a generation.

A new American generation was rising. There was a 15-year-old teenage boy named Abraham and a four-year-old boy named Ulysses, both from Illinois. There was a five-year-old slave boy named Frederick, and a two-year-old slave girl named Harriet, both from Maryland.

Outside of American territory, Sitting Bull’s father, Jumping Bull, was a 21-year-old Lakota warrior. Civilizations were colliding. The last was giving way to the future and a new frontier was beginning.

Two hundred years have passed since Lafayette came to say goodbye.

Soon America will celebrate its 250th birthday. We are a nation conceived in liberty, led by a Nero who claims the rights of a king. He is systematically assaulting the project conceived by the founders as we prepare to honor their achievement with Trump’s dagger at the throat of the Republic.

We are a nation of 347 million people that stretches from the shores of Maine to the western Pacific Ocean and Arctic Circle. The United States is the greatest experiment in human freedom in human civilization, but it is neither immune from collapse or catastrophe. It has been said many times by many people in many languages that freedom is only ever a generation away from collapsing.

There is no society on Earth that is more vital, vibrant and complicated. There has never been an untroubled hour in America’s history and there won’t be one. Ever.

There is no heaven on Earth, but there is America — and for that we must be grateful.

We must all feel obligated and responsible for America.

We must face the truth about this moment with the same clarity and determination of our French friend, who is looking to all of us to stand up for America and the whole world.

We must fight for our liberty by removing the stain of MAGA from the White House and Congress, where they stand opposed to the American creed. They are working hard to remake the American project into a twisted version of the glory it had once known.

Sometimes it helps to see the country through foreign eyes.

It turned out the response to Trump’s authoritarian performance theater in front of the Vichy Congress came from France and it was epic.

---

---