before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.

Its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers, pouring out from its shores

to cross oceans, settle on new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus,

it was contracting.

Europe was in ruins.

Half of it lived behind an iron curtain,

and the rest looked like it would soon follow.

The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline

accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial

uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West's age of dominance had come to an end,

and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.

But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice,

and it was a choice they refused to make.

This is what we did together once before,

and this is what President Trump in the United States

want to do again now, together with you.

Let's go to show.

Jeffrey Webster. Let's go to show. Together with you. Ladies and gentlemen, at long last, we're back. We're back.

We're back.

And there is no, there's literally an empty chair.

...