Rich Lowry writes: One of Donald Trump’s political skills is giving widely condemned speeches.
His post-Orlando jeremiad fit the pattern, but the speech was a little like Wagner’s music as described in the famous Mark Twain line: Not as bad as it sounds. There is something so inherently inflammatory in Trump’s delivery that he could read the Gettysburg Address and some listeners would wonder how he could possibly say such a thing.
The kernel of Trump’s speech was rather obvious: “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here. That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about.”
The reaction of much of the opinion elite was nearly instantaneous: Whatever we do, let’s not talk about that fact.
Countless articles have been written on how much better we are at assimilating Muslim immigrants than Europe is, usually with a heavy element of back-patting over our openness and fluidity as a society in contrast to the self-defeating insularity of a country like France.
This may well be true, but the assumption that we have the magic formula is, at the very least, under stress now that we’ve repeatedly suffered mass killings by second-generation immigrants. Read on.
