The Trump Phenomenon with James Kelso, August 13, 2025

Some of you younger Trump Phenomenon listeners may not have even been born on June 8, 1978 (my 30th birthday), when Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered his earth-shattering Commencement Address at Harvard. We didn’t have an Internet that day, and also, unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn was compelled by his poor English to speak in Russian. I’m only now, at age 77, fully realizing how incredibly clearly Solzhenitsyn foresaw the American future. The Harvard types present started relegating the great Solzhenitsyn to their Memory Hole right then and there, as the author of The Gulag Archipelago somehow saw the future that we actually have all now experienced, 47 years later. Vladimir Putin knew and admired Solzhenitsyn, and here we will be, on Friday, with Presidents Putin and Trump finding out “whether we have the will (Solzhenitsyn referred to it as ‘courage’) to defend Western Civilization”. If he were alive today, August 13, 2025, Solzhenitsyn would assuredly shock his Harvard audience with the same shock he gave them in 1978: “You Americans have lost your courage. You have lost your courage and honesty so completely that I (he said this in 1978) would not ask the Russian people to trade their level of civilization, with all of its faults, for yours. We have kept our courage. You have lost yours.”