I like Ike. Does Donald Trump?

March 07, 2025 2 Reactions

Its extraordinary length disqualified President Trump’s speech this week to the joint houses of Congress from being entered in the Make Oratory Great Again competition. But it ended on a note which can fairly be described as Obama-esque in its soaring rhetoric:

And it’s our turn to take America’s destiny into our own hands and begin the most thrilling days in the history of our country. This will be our greatest era; with God’s help over the next four years, we are going to lead this nation even higher, and we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.

And he concluded: “get ready for an incredible future because the golden age of America has only just begun”.

Everyone understands that such statements are aspirational and are not grist for the fact-checkers. But at the risk of sounding churlish, perhaps a bit of dream-checking is in order.

I begin with a look at the 1950s. President Trump is crystal clear about when America was not great – from 2008 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2024 – and vague on when it was. But most Americans agree that the post-World War II boom years, the years when the Greatest Generation settled into suburban family life, were great. There was rapid economic growth, a strong manufacturing sector, rapid growth in home ownership, world supremacy, and high trust in government and institutions.

At the centre of this was President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. Ike was not a lightning rod for controversy. He was competent and boring. He kept a steady hand on the tiller and voters loved him. Historian Paul Johnson has described him as “the most successful of America’s twentieth century presidents, and the decade when he ruled [was] the most prosperous in American, and indeed world, history.”

Journalists caricature America’s Fifties as a decade of prosperous, dull complacency. That’s not the way Ike saw it. In his first State of the Union message in 1953 he sketched the enormous challenges that America faced. In some respects they resemble Trump’s: a forever war in Korea, “aggressive communism”, “our inherited burden of indebtedness and obligations and deficits”, poisonous McCarthyism, Mexican immigration, a bloated bureaucracy, and racial tension.

Eisenhower dealt with these challenges effectively. When he handed the reins to JFK, Johnson says:

“America was prosperous and solvent. Inflation was low. With considerable difficulty, he had kept defense spending under control; in two years he had balanced the budget; and in the remaining six, the deficits had been reasonable. Ike’s personal standing had never been higher, and he knew he was respected all over the nation, and in some quarters loved.”

We’ll leave the “how” of his achievement to historians. But in his own mind, Ike knew that the secret was not America’s wealth or resources. It was its people. “We must be strong, above all, in the spiritual resources upon which all else depends,” he declared. Admittedly, this is vague. But in his first Inaugural Address two weeks before, he expanded upon his vision for a spiritually rich nation.

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First of all, to everyone’s surprise, he opened with a prayer he had composed himself. It was short, but unprecedented. “Almighty God,” he began, “Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land.”

He did not invoke God in the body of his speech, but the text was imbued with his belief that American would stand or fall with the strength of personal convictions and a relationship with God:

For this truth must be clear before us: whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

The peace we seek, then, is nothing less than the practice and fulfillment of our whole faith among ourselves and in our dealings with others. This signifies more than the stilling of guns, easing the sorrow of war. More than escape from death, it is a way of life. More than a haven for the weary, it is a hope for the brave.

In other words, Ike’s polestar, the star which led him into the most successful decade of American history, was that America is great because she is good. He was consistent with these sentiments. A few days after his inauguration, he popped over to Washington's National Presbyterian Church where he was baptised and confirmed.

Donald Trump has a harder job, a much harder job. He wants to Make America Great Again, while Ike’s was just to Keep America Great. The problem is that the current President believes that his country’s problems are mainly caused by outsiders.

This is patently not true. The United States has a falling birth rate, high levels of drug abuse and overdose deaths, nearly a million abortions a year, rising deaths of despair, record numbers of single mothers and absent fathers, loneliness so deep it has become a major public health issue, and falling educational standards. Imposing tariffs, annexing Greenland and deporting illegal immigrants will not fix any of these problems.

Of course, the US is hardly exceptional in these social pathologies – western Europe has them as well. But Trump promised in his inaugural address this year to make America “far more exceptional than ever before”. He did not campaign to make America better than Belgium.

But how?

There are limits to a President’s power. Executive orders cannot save a single marriage or turn a lonely man from suicide. But Trump could use his bully pulpit to focus the public’s mind on the desperate urgency of strengthening the American family. He could point out that fewer children and more elderly are leading to financial ruin. He could ring the alarm bells to scream: “If no changes to the system are made, the Social Security Administration will be unable to pay scheduled benefits in full and on time starting in 2035.” He could acknowledge that he needs tariffs not to punish recalcitrants, but to keep the US from fiscal collapse.

President Trump is promising his countrymen that he will deliver a new golden age. Time will tell whether he will be another Ike. But at the moment, I believe that the best he can deliver is a new gilded age.

Forward this to your friends.

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator.

Image credits: screenshot / Britannica

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Emberson Fedders commented 2025-03-08 21:00:54 +1100

Hmm, I doubt Trump would really know who Eisenhower is.

Trump would hate the 50% tax rate for corporation. And he’d hate that American workers on average earned $35,000, far more than today. And he’s rate that the tax rate for millionaires was 11% higher than it is now.

Trumps plan seems to be push up unemployment and the corresponding hit to small businesses while making rich people even richer. I doubt that’s gonna lead to a new ‘golden age’.
Michael Cook published this page in The Latest 2025-03-07 17:25:14 +1100

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