Trump's visit was meant to carry symbolic weight. Daniel Tilles, editor of the Notes from Poland social media news group, commented prior to the visit that Trump and PiS "share a distain for the conventional rules and practices of democracy" and will try to "capitalize on their agreement on major issues like migration, defense and a distrust of institutions such as the media and the judiciary". [...]
For his part, Trump declared America's love for Poland, credited Polish-Americans for voting for him, and heaped praise on the PiS establishment. His speech left PiS delirious. Prime Minister Beata Szydło immediately stated that the speech demonstrated that now "Poland was an important country" and even a "guarantor of world peace".
There were few genuinely critical voices in the press, but only Greenpeace, the Razem (Together) party and other leftist groups staged small protests. Poland is a middle-sized country in Europe, but too often its elites suffer from the inferiority complex of a small country. The parliamentary opposition, still struggling to mount a credible electoral challenge to PiS, dared not criticise Trump's speech seeing it as a 'success for Poland'. PiS could not have wished for a better propaganda coup. [...]
Even before Trump's arrival, reports emerged that a controversial historian, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, from the Institute of World Politics (which employs another infamous Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka), had a hand in writing the speech. According to Rafał Pankowski, a member of the anti-racist Never Again Association, this "raised eyebrows because of Chodakiewicz’s long record of far-right links. He is mostly known as a denier of Polish responsibility for acts of antisemitism".
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