Adopted from May 2026 Commencement Speech.
America turns 250 this year. That should mean celebration. But if all we do is throw fireworks and post flag photos, we’ll miss the point. Two hundred and fifty years doesn’t prove we’re perfect. It proves something more useful: we can endure. We can correct course. We can renew. But only when citizens decide—again and again—that freedom is not a spectator sport.
And that brings us to the unfashionable word we’d rather dodge: responsibility…