‘Freedom Man’

President Trump’s campaign stop at the Truong Tien Vietnamese Restaurant at the Eden Center at Falls Church, Virginia, illuminates his instinct for the deep currents in America. Those currents were touched on here in 2021 in an editorial called “The Surprise Witness.” We wrote it after staring at photographs of the tumult on January 6 at the West Front of the Capitol. Suddenly, we clapped a hand over our mouth to stifle a cry of amazement.For dotting the crowd were maybe half a dozen persons waving — on long poles with banners held high — the flag of Free Vietnam. Those weren’t the only flags waved by the protesters on January 6. Most of the emblems were American flags, or protest banners. Yet the flag of the Republic of Vietnam, our ally during the war against the Communist North, was — with its glorious colors of yellow and red stripes — unmistakable.“Until that moment,” we wrote, “we had managed to miss this strand among the forgotten men and women of the Trump coalition. Who was flying that flag — and why? Was it just about Mr. Trump? Or about still nursing a grudge against Congress for voting, after our last GIs were already home, to cut off all military aid to our erstwhile ally and abandon them to the long night of communism?”It turns out, we wrote back in 2021, “that the Vietnamese standard was all over Capitol Hill on January 6.” NBC News reported that it is often flown by Vietnamese Americans in support of President Trump. NBC quoted a Vietnamese American woman, Michelle Le, as saying, in a Facebook posting, that the Free Vietnamese Flag was “a reminder of my roots and heritage. I had lived through Communism and I know the tyranny and the pain.”It’s not our intention here to put the gloss on the events of January 6. It is our purpose, though, to spare some thoughts for the losers in the Vietnam war. They did not lose the war militarily. The military forces of South Vietnam and America prevailed in combat, only to see the surrender of Vietnam forced by the Congress, controlled by the Democrats, in a betrayal of our ally of which a young senator named Joe Biden was among the minor architects.Who other than President Trump, we asked back then, had managed to embrace Ms. Le’s and Vietnam’s noble cause? All the nicer to see, this week on X, that photograph of President Trump posing at the Vietnamese restaurant with its owner and with the Republican candidate for the Senate from Virginia. The candidate, Hung Cao, was, in 1975, himself a refugee. He became a United States Navy captain and now is challenging Senator Kaine.It’s newsworthy that the 45th president showed up and endorsed Captain Cao. Trump was, when in Virginia, also at Arlington Cemetery, with flowers for two Marines and a soldier who fell in the chaos of the Biden-Harris administration’s surrender of Afghanistan, echoing 1975. To those who mock Trump as, like Bill Clinton, a draft dodger, we say that the test is not only what they did then, but the wisdom age has given them.“Somehow, I don’t know what it is, you’ll have to explain it, but the Vietnamese community loves me. I love them,” Trump said at the restaurant Monday. Could the affinity relate to the experience in America of the refugees who fled the tyranny of Communism? And to Trump’s advocacy of free-market, pro-growth policies in contrast with the increasingly statist political positions adopted by his Democratic rivals?Trump’s campaign stop in Virginia for a refugee turned Navy captain is an American moment. It echoes President Reagan’s farewell address, in which he told of one of the small boats of refugees from communist Vietnam that was rescued at sea by a launch from the Midway. Approaching the Midway, one of the refugees, spying a sailor on deck, stood up and called out the immortal words, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.”

‘Freedom Man’

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