From the Sept/Oct, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

Quodlibet

We Don’t Do That

by R. V. Young

Peggy Noonan is shocked, scandalized even. In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (July 7, 2025), she excoriates President Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg celebrating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army for its extreme partisan rhetoric: “Previous presidents knew to be chary with this kind of thing, never to put members of the military in a position where they are pressed or encouraged to show allegiance to one man or party.” Then Ms. Noonan deplores Mr. Trump’s equally fiery rhetoric about sending National Guard troops to quell the violent resistance to ICE enforcement of immigration laws in Los Angeles. She contrasts his approach unfavorably with that of George H. W. Bush, who expressed reluctance to send the National Guard to Los Angeles in 1992 in connection with the riots that erupted in the wake of the Rodney King affair. Mr. Trump, she maintains, showed an unseemly enthusiasm: “We don’t do that. American presidents don’t promise to bloody rioters’ heads. You’re supposed to be reluctant to use force, not eager.” Similarly, Ms. Noonan was outraged by the military parade the President staged in Washington, again to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary: “Swaggering, threats, parading your strength—we don’t do that, the other guys do that.”

Now, I concede that, not infrequently, Donald Trump’s words and actions make me cringe. What I find baffling, however, is the implicit proposition that somehow Mr. Trump has crossed a line that had heretofore been sacrosanct. Peggy Noonan is a Catholic, but I don’t believe she has been living in a cloistered convent for the past 60 years, during which time the dominant forces of our culture—our academic and artistic institutions, our media, our judiciary, our government bureaucracies—have mounted a relentless campaign to make it impossible to say “We don’t do that” about anything. Anyone except, apparently, Ms. Noonan can think of dozens of examples, but I shall offer three: in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War protests, it became a bold political statement—rather than something “we don’t do”—to desecrate the American flag. In 1987, while Peggy Noonan was writing speeches for President Ronald Reagan, a certain Andres Serrano produced, with NEA funding, a photograph of a plastic statue of Jesus submerged in a glass container of the “artist’s” urine, which was hailed as a prize-winning work of art. Outraged citizens who complained (“We don’t do that”) were submerged in scorn. And then there is President Bill Clinton, who amused himself in the White House by sodomizing a young female intern. This was defended by Mr. Clinton’s numerous female adherents as “consensual sex between two adults.”

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R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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