Over at Power Line, Steven Hayward makes a striking, and funny, observation (boldface mine):

I join John in utter amazement (though not surprise) about the left’s freak out over Donald Trump’s defense of the West in his terrific Warsaw speech. From the reaction John and others have highlighted, you’d have thought Trump had called Russia an “evil empire” or something. (Heh.) I hope Trump continues this theme, and provides the left with more beclowning opportunities. If this keeps up Trump is going to carry 45 states in 2020. Who could have foreseen that Donald Trump would become the rhetorical successor to Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 or Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg in 2006?

That's right, the smug, sanctimonious left has gotten so unmoored in its loathing for the West that it has ceded the title of defender of its hated Western Civilization to ... are you ready? ... Donald Trump. That's right, Donald Trump, real estate developer extraordinaire, man of gold-plated fixtures and brassy towers with his name on them, celebrity tabloid culture regular and reality TV star. Now - and there really is not arguing with it - he's also the world's foremost  defender of Western Civilization.

Trump has been the voice of moral leadership not just on whether the West is worth defending, as he stated in Poland last week, but in taking the leadership on forbidding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and in standing up for the helpless British baby victim of socialism, tiny Charlie Gard. Improbable as it sounds, such statements are the substance of moral leadership no matter what one thinks of the vessel. The whole thing is happening not because Trump is some particularly morally pure human messenger. Solzhenitsyn with his multiple marriages and poetry about raping German women made no pretenses to morality either even as he spoke out morally with such powe. He was eventually just chosen, as the biblical Jacob was chosen, flaws and all. So it seems is the role that Trump is now in. Trump speaks out when something needs to be said. The pope won't do it. Angela Merkel won't do it. Obama certainly won't do it. The cowardice on the left is very clear on that front, none of those people are willing to say anything that might make them unpopular within their social bubble. The Pope sometimes moves in that direction cagily after an outcry, but this isn't impressive. Trump will, however.

And that is not only the function of the office he holds, it's the fact that he is willing to use its bully pulpit to say the right thing that needs to be said. It's also a commentary on the widespread rot in the culture spread by the left in that there are so few voices of diversity, the soggy one-world-government attitude of the left is all over, taking Western Civilization for granted, while its crazed component in the universities and in the intelligentsia is still boiling with anti-Western lunacy. In that atmosphere, how could there not be an opening to defend Western Civilization for Trump? Who is smart enough to recognize it and run with it? Yes indeed, he really is the defender of Western Civilization - even as he might be the last guy we'd expect.

Could Tom Wolfe have imagined this one when he was writing about the Studio 54 scene Trump was a part of around the same time he was writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard speech, in Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine? I don't think even Wolfe could have foreseen that one. Oh for the talents of Tom Wolfe to do the honors on this one.