Had Donald Trump given the Gettysburg Address, liberals would have called it insultingly brief. No matter how eloquently and sensibly he speaks, they stand ready to snipe at him. No sooner had he finished his stellar remarks in Poland than they grabbed for their wet blankets. Yes, he criticized Russia; yes, he defended NATO. But why, they wanted to know, didn’t he attack his hosts? Or as the New York Times put it: “Mr. Trump roused his Polish hosts by recounting the country’s history of resistance to invaders, including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But he said nothing about the right-wing government’s crackdown on judges and journalists and its refusal to accept more migrants, policies that have upset European Union leaders. He instead praised Poland as a defender of liberty in the face of existential threats.”

Trump’s speech rested on a defense of basic truths that only liberalism could find controversially “nationalist.” Seen through liberalism’s warped lens, a restatement of common sense, universal to all, is treated as “divisive” while explicitly dividing people by special-interest categories is “unifying.” In that perverse spirit, liberals looked for sins of omission and found one in Trump’s not visiting a monument to Jewish victims of the Nazis. Ivanka, a convert to Judaism, visited it, but that wasn’t good enough.

The media’s sour response was due in no small part to its hopeless secularism. Trump’s theism is far too uncomplicated for the taste of elite journalists. In one of the most powerful passages of his speech, he recalled the religious resolution of the Polish people against the Soviets:

Through four decades of communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity — indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity. Yet, through it all, you never lost that spirit. Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken. And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: “We Want God.”

Such talk is bound to make Western liberals, who still wonder if the right side won the Cold War, uneasy. They still can’t forgive Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But they wouldn’t mind if Trump called Putin an evil emperor. They once insisted upon “dialogue” with Russia; now they forbid it, not because Putin is slaughtering people and invading countries in Central America and Africa like his predecessors but because he commits such enormities as not permitting LGBT parades in Moscow.

On Thursday afternoon, in what was described as a spur-of-the-moment decision, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio flew off to Germany to protest his country’s president. He will join the anti-Trump protests in Hamburg. In Trump, the Germans have finally found a visitor to their country they can’t accept.

Even liberal New Yorkers couldn’t believe the jackassery of de Blasio’s jaunt to Hamburg. The Big Apple is reeling from a cop killing (a single mother of three was shot in the head by a thug while she sat in her cop car filling out paperwork), a frightening incident involving a nun who barely fled a dangerous vagrant who accosted her while she was praying in a church, and the release of a report showing a 34% spike in homelessness this year.

The more money Mayor de Blasio throws at the problem of homelessness, the more it increases. Want to see liberal compassion? Walk through Times Square and you will see it in the half-naked, drug-addled homeless sprawled across grates. The mayor thinks it compassionate to leave them there until social workers have “convinced” them to enter a shelter — a process that typically takes up to “three months,” de Blasio helpfully adds.

While New York City descends into the “summer of Hell,” as the tabloid press calls it, the mayor turns up at “Welcome to Hell” protests, spreading the socialism that is sapping the vigor of his own city — the very picture of a flaccid West Trump went to Poland to tear up.