Noonan Rates the UN Speech

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan was, in an earlier life, a presidential speech writer for Ronald Reagan. She is a connoisseur of presidential speeches and thus her reaction to President Trump's UN speech is of interest.

So, did Noonan like it? She liked his UN speech a lot, while careful to hedge her bets as to its impact.

It was a strong speech—clear, emphatic, remarkably blunt. The great question is whether the bluntness will tend at this point in history to make things better or worse. We’ll find out soon enough.

This is the opposite of democracy promotion and nation building and dreams of eradicating evil.

A great line—because it spoke a great truth—was this: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.” Mr. Trump then paused and looked at the audience. It struck some as a “please clap” moment. It struck me as a stare-down: I’m saying something a lot of you need to hear. You’re not going to like it, and I’m going to watch you not like it.

Politicians like to believe they can command their economy. In fact the economy will not obey, a truth of which Venezuela provides only the most recent hard-to-watch, harder-to-live-through demonstration.