The Performance Was the Point

How Trump’s West Point Speech Was Framed, Forgotten, and Rewritten in Real Time

It’s Memorial Day. A time for reflection. A time for honoring sacrifice. And a time, I think, to pay attention to how memory itself is shaped.

This morning, like many of you, I was thinking about legacy—about the weight of service, and the cost of silence. Then I rewatched Trump’s West Point speech, and what struck me most wasn’t just what he said—it was how quickly it was reframed, softened, and forgotten.

On a day meant for remembering, I want to talk about what we’re being asked to forget.

The Performance Was the Point

On May 24, 2025, President Trump delivered the commencement address at West Point to 1,002 graduating cadets. The scene looked familiar: flags, uniforms, formality. But the speech wasn’t a tribute to service. It wasn’t a policy address. It was a performance—part campaign rally, part loyalty ritual, part personal mythology—staged inside one of the military’s most sacred traditions.

And what followed was just as calculated: the swift sanitization of what had actually happened.

What the Papers Said

The New York Times led with:

“Trump Gives Commencement Address at West Point, Stressing a New Era.”

They mentioned his red MAGA hat. They quoted his swipe at “nation-building crusades” and “absurd ideological experiments.” But they omitted the loyalty pledge. They ignored his false claim to have won the 2024 election “by millions of votes.” They skipped over his call to “kill America’s enemies” and his assertion that West Point had “won both world wars.”

It wasn’t selective coverage. It was narrative control.

Zooming Out

The Associated Press quoted his grievances and campaign one-liners, including the “trophy wife” story and the line about facing more investigations than Al Capone. They even cited his remark that the military’s job is to “crush America’s adversaries.”

But the framing was still clinical. No mention of the spectacle. No acknowledgment of the crowd being led in a raised-hand oath. No recognition that the line between ceremony and spectacle had been deliberately erased.

I wasn’t just disturbed by what he said.
I was disturbed by how quickly I began questioning whether I’d imagined it.

Politico Got the Mood, Not the Message

Politico came closest. They acknowledged the campaign-style atmosphere, Trump’s fixation on the cadets’ appearance (“a bunch of male models”), and the symbolic gesture of bringing the quarterback onstage to argue against trans athletes in women’s sports.

But the ritual was still treated as spectacle, not signal.
No mention of the oath. No reckoning with what it meant.

They described the surface.
They didn’t touch the rot.

The Official Rewrite

The Department of Defense’s summary stripped away everything that mattered. Gone was the hat. Gone were the pledges, the boasts, the distortions. What remained was a reverent highlight reel of leadership and innovation.

“Trump Lauds Cadets for Choosing Service, Honor Over Civilian Life.”

That wasn’t omission.
It was memory laundering.

Fringe Accuracy

And then there was Jeff Tiedrich’s Substack:

“Elderly Golfer’s Brain Goes Fuckity-Bye in Batshit West Point Speech.”

Crude, but closer to the truth.

Tiedrich documented what mainstream outlets wouldn’t: the incoherence, the raised hands, the vanishing of full transcripts from the White House website. He noted what others tiptoed around—that Trump’s presidency had abandoned the dignity of office for the domination of the spectacle.

When words become too dangerous to archive, performance becomes record.

This Wasn’t Just a Speech

Trump didn’t just deliver remarks.
He staged a loyalty ritual.
He distorted history.
He turned cadets into props.
He declared that America’s military would be rebuilt in his image—and left no room for disagreement.

And across nearly every outlet, the response was the same: soften the language, normalize the moment, move on.

But the truth is this:

The performance wasn’t incidental.
The performance was the point.

Final Thought

Maybe the rage is proportionate.
Maybe profanity is a feature, not a flaw, when clarity is in short supply.
And maybe the most dangerous part of this speech wasn’t what Trump said.
It’s that no one in power seems willing to say what it meant.

That’s how the performance becomes the point.