US President Donald Trump gives commencement address at West Point, stressing new era

President Donald Trump told cadets in a commencement address at the US Military Academy at West Point on Saturday that they were the first graduates to serve in a “golden age” of the nation that was a result of his efforts to rebuild the military and reshape American society.

Gone are the “nation-building crusades” in countries that “wanted nothing to do with us” and leadership that subjected service members to “absurd ideological experiments here and at home,” Trump told the group of about 1000 cadets.

Wearing his red “Make America Great Again” hat, Trump leaned into his aggressive agenda to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the government, military and virtually every facet of American life to make the pitch that the nation is worth fighting for again. He drew applause from guests at times, such as when he discussed the issue of transgender athletes playing in female sports and hiring on merit over diversity.

At the outset of his second term, he issued a spate of executive orders targeting programs and policies that have helped address systemic racism, which he deemed divisive and unpatriotic.

He claimed that his predecessors had “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars.”

“All of that’s ended. It’s ended strongly,” he said. “They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore.”

Trump’s crusade against diversity has been particularly pronounced in the military, where there has been an aggressive erasure of the valor of Black, female and other groups, down to eliminating and obscuring content honouring those buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump has also sought to overhaul the military by making its ranks less diverse. He removed a Black four-star general as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and dismissed high-ranking women. He also banned transgender people from serving in the military.

His defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard, has been among the most aggressive champions of Trump’s campaign. At his first staff meeting, he proclaimed: “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’”

Academics at West Point, a historically apolitical military academy that is run by the Department of Defence, were recently caught in the crossfire of Trump’s culture war.

To comply with Trump’s and Hegseth’s orders, the institution targeted books about race and gender for removal, disbanded a dozen affinity groups, scrubbed curricula and dropped classes. Faculty members have publicly criticised what they see as a dangerous infringement on the school’s academic freedom, and one even quit.

In his commencement address, Trump did not address the turmoil on campus directly but boasted about how he had “liberated our troops from divisive and demeaning political trainings.” He also touted how, in his administration, appointments and promotions are not based on politics or identity.

“We’re a merit-based country again,” he said.

Trump’s remarks drew a stark contrast with the speech he gave when he spoke on the campus during his first term, as the country was in the midst of a reckoning over its racist history following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man whom the world watched cry for his mother as he lay dying under a white police officer’s knee.

In that 2020 speech, Trump urged West Point’s graduating class to “never forget” the legacy of soldiers before them who had fought a bloody war to “extinguish the evil of slavery.”

“What has historically made America unique is the durability of its institutions against the passions and prejudices of the moment,” Trump said then. “When times are turbulent, when the road is rough, what matters most is that which is permanent, timeless, enduring and eternal.”

This year, Trump extolled the cultural reckoning he was leading.

“We’re getting rid of distractions,” Trump said, “and we’re focusing our military on its core mission: crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies and defending our great American flag like it has never been defended before.”

Trump also rambled at times as he took shots at his opponents and told stories about how a famous golf buddy came to have a “trophy wife.”

He also spent considerable time praising the achievements of the graduates — he brought several of them onstage — and told them that they were graduating at a “defining moment” in the Army’s history, and were “respected more than any army anywhere in the world.”

Trump, who never served in the military and avoided the Vietnam War by citing bone spurs in his foot, touted projects that he hoped the new officers would be excited about, including “brand-new, beautiful planes,” and the Golden Dome missile defence shield initiative that he unveiled this past week.

“In a few moments, you’ll become graduates of the most elite and storied military academy in human history,” Trump said. “And you will become officers of the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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