Donald Trump Is Changing What It Means To Be ‘American’

In his third consecutive bid for the presidency, Donald Trump has cast the United States, yet again, as a nation in decline mired by chaos, violence, internal subversion and subjugation.

The U.S. is a “garbage can,” Trump says, that has been “invaded and conquered” by “murderers, rapists, and illegal criminals” and “vermin” with “bad genes” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” thanks to the machinations of his political foes ― “the enemy within.” Some of these enemies ― immigrants and citizens alike ― are “not people.”

This rhetoric underlies a policy program that aims to tear apart the country at the seams.

Immigrants both with and without legal status are to be targeted for detention, deportation and denaturalization in the largest internal law enforcement project the country has ever undertaken. It will be a “bloody story,” Trump promises.

Political opponents and election officials, the “enemy within” he speaks of, will be investigated and put on trial for unspecified crimes while he will pardon those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 on his behalf. The military will be deployed against U.S. citizens who protest any of these actions. He even aims to suspend the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship ― the foundational constitutional provision that enshrines in law the truth we hold to be self-evident, that “all men [and women] are created equal.”

For nearly 10 years, Americans have sought to understand Trump, the intellectual currents that sustain his political rise and the MAGA movement that adores him. And they’ve tried to understand why he defies what were once the normal rules of politics. Scandals, whether it be his crude and insulting statements, the many allegations of sexual assault levied against him or his naked corruption, deflect off of him. Fact-checking, which boomed as a journalism endeavor during his presidency, made little difference.

The problem that many observers have had in understanding Trump, is that they have been making a category error in trying to make sense of Trump by the normal means of fact-based interpretation. Back in 2016, the media was told by conservatives, like journalist Salena Zito and far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to take Trump “seriously, not literally.” But this formula does not get to the heart of the matter. Following the Jan. 6 attack, I wrote that “Trump’s supporters were not taking his words either literally or seriously, they were taking them mythically.”

What Trump has sought to do ever since he descended the Trump Tower escalator ― whether he knew it himself or not ― is to supplant our country’s national political mythos and replace it with his own new spin on a very old story.

In the U.S., our politics operate on the foundation of a number of myths that hold varying interpretations to different social groups. For example, the myth of the American Founding, that guides fidelity to the original principles set forth at the beginning of the nation in the present; and the Frontier Myth, wherein the vast lands and resources to be taken from native peoples provided “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” in order to forge a new American identity and yield unending growth, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893.

But the key to understanding what Trump means is to look at the national myth that became the national creed following World War II in the 20th century: the “electric chord” that bound the nation, and that has since been broken.

The most well-known words in the American national idiom are those written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A close second might be the brief speech Abraham Lincoln made to commemorate the cemetery at Gettysburg: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address announced a revolution in American thought. Instead of locating the founding of the country with the 1787 adoption of the Constitution, 76 years prior, he argued that the nation’s true founding came with the adoption of the Declaration and its principle that “all men are created equal.” Instead of rooting national identity in white Anglo-Saxon heritage, he rooted it in principle. In calling for a “new birth of freedom,” he crafted a dramatic narrative that gave significance to the action Americans should take to fulfill their country’s promise. A myth.

This myth denies that American nationhood and citizenship is defined by blood, national origin or religion. It is instead defined by belief in a principle ― an idea ― that says that all people are created equal and endowed with particular rights that exist prior to the establishment of the Constitution. Lincoln outlined this in prior speeches.

In 1858, Lincoln gave a speech in Chicago addressing how recent immigrants to the country could still be considered American. While they cannot “trace their connection” to the founding “by blood,” immigrants can “look through that old Declaration of Independence” and know “that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”

“That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world,” Lincoln said.

Lincoln’s myth did not take hold after the Civil War. It took until the second World War and its aftermath for it to become gospel.

This American Creed emerged as the consensus view of American nationalism in the 20th century. It came about due to the ideological nature of the war against Nazi Germany, domestic and international pressure to resolve the oppression of Black Americans, and a push for greater integration and acknowledgement of the immigrants who had immigrated in large numbers at the turn of the 20th century.

“Creedal nationalism was an attempt to explain the continuity of American institutions despite the transformation of its population,” Samuel Goldman writes in his 2021 book, “After Nationalism.”

“The nation could absorb so much immigration, liberal theorists reasoned, because its essence lay in ideas rather than in blood, soil, or religious confession.”

Franklin Roosevelt reflected this when he told the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1938 to “Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

This national myth provided significance to the push for civil rights at home, the ending of immigration quotas and also foreign wars against supposed totalitarian foes.

Today, this myth is still expounded by politicians ― although largely from the Democratic Party.

“America is an idea — an idea is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator,” President Joe Biden said in announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race in July.

“The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in her closing speech on the Ellipse on Oct. 29.

It is this myth that Trump and his allies are arrayed against.

Despite occasional strategic nods to the Declaration as the source of the country’s meaning, Trump’s political career has been exemplified by a rejection of Lincoln’s creed. He and his allies have repeatedly sought to draw exclusionary lines on who is and isn’t an American, often on veiled or not-so veiled ethnic and racial grounds, and rejects Lincoln’s interpretation that the Declaration’s principle means that all men (and women) are created equal in the entire world. His promises to undo the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship, which enshrined Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration into law, is no doubt the clearest example of his desire to reverse Lincoln’s myth.

His own vice presidential nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance rather explicitly took on creedal interpretations of American identity in his acceptance speech where he drew a picture of his family’s cemetery plot in Kentucky.

“Seven generations of people who have fought for this country,” he said. “Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

“Now that’s not just an idea, my friends,” he added. “That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address consecrates the war cemetery not for the dead, who “have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” Instead, he uses it to call “the living” to be “dedicated” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” To win the war that tested whether “any nation” that was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.”

Vance’s framing would reject this entirely. His rhetoric claims that no one will “fight for abstractions” and instead will only fight for their “homeland.” What he describes is people joined to the soil and the blood of their ancestors. And what he rejects is people joined together by their common belief in an idea.

This is by no means new to American conservatism. The Lost Cause ideology that emerged out of the South following the Civil War explicitly rejected equality as the basis of American identity. This rejection of equality was joined by Northerners who saw inspiration in southern anti-Black racism to oppose and restrict immigration by non-“Nordic” Europeans. Conservative movement thinkers also strongly campaigned against a creedal interpretation of national identity in the 20th century ― instead claiming that freedom wasn’t meant for all, but to be limited by a consensus made by conservative white Americans.

But this strain largely remained submerged in the conservative movement, as the coalition that came together in the Republican Party cohere around the shared goal of opposition to communism amid the emergence of the Cold War. Anti-communism was expressed through the American Creed, as the foundation of the “Free World” in its fight against totalitarianism and what made America exceptional among all nations.

“America represents something universal in the human spirit,” Ronald Reagan said in 1989 before quoting a letter he said he received from a friend. That letter read, “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. … Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”

Not long after Reagan’s departure from the political scene and the end of the Cold War, conservatives began reversing course. Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention presaged Trump’s rhetoric in casting America as suffering from decadence and decline brought about by deference to Blacks, secularists, feminists, and gays and lesbians.

A “cultural war” was underway, Buchanan announced, that is “as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” On one side he put Democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton, who supported “homosexual rights,” “abortion on demand,” “women in combat units,” and “radical feminism.” On the other were conservative Republicans, who he said still believed in “the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded.”

In 1997, after two consecutive presidential election losses for conservatives, the National Review published an essay by editor John O’Sullivan called After Reaganism that explicitly rejected the American Creed.

In it, he lamented as “absurd” and utopian “the neoconservative belief that America is not a country, but an idea — a ‘cre[e]dal nation’ held together not by ethnic links, cultural sympathies, or shared historical memories, but by conscious subscription to the liberal political ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence and entrenched in the Constitution.”

Between then and Trump’s emergence, something happened. The significance of the creed began to come unglued.

Once used as the ideological inspiration for America’s foreign policies aimed at spreading democracy around the world, the myth crashed aground in Iraq after George W. Bush lied the country into an ill-thought out war of choice and implemented a torture policy that violated international law. In doing so, he defied global opinion and the institutions of the 20th century’s liberal international order.

Free trade deals that promised both a new frontier of unending growth and to eventually spread democracy through open markets decimated communities across the country in rapid succession while failing to make any country’s political system more democratic.

Myths only continue to exist as myths when they hold significance for a particular social group. “A political myth can be defined as the work of a common narrative by which the members of a social group (or society) provide significance to their political experience and deeds,” Chiara Boticci writes in her book, “The Philosophy of Political Myth.”

And that becomes evident in its absence, too: Amid multiple crises and changing material conditions in the country, the American creedal myth that long sustained the country seemingly ceased to provide meaning for many Americans.

Trump moved to fill the vacuum with a narrative of decadence, decline and civilizational collapse that he “alone” could fix. This apocalyptic vision mobilized supporters to believe that the end times were not just nigh, but already happening. That they needed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

“I will give you everything,” Trump said in 2016. “I will give you what you’ve been looking for 50 years. I’m the only one.”

This myth of decline and promise of retribution and salvation provides meaning and justification for a non-majoritarian conservatism that has lost the popular presidential vote in seven out of the last eight elections and no longer believes it can coexist with liberals. Anything is permissible in the face of such decline, including minority rule and, if need be, overturning the will of the people. “The people are corrupt,” wrote the Trumpist intellectual Michael Anton.

There are “many native-born people who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans,” Glenn Elmers wrote in a 2021 piece titled Conservatism Is No Longer Enough.

Elmers called for “overturning the existing post-American order” by “counter-revolution” and exhorted his readers to start lifting weights because “strong people are harder to kill.”

“As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” far-right conspiracist Jack Posobiec writes in his 2024 book “Unhumans,” which goes on to praise fascist dictator Francisco Franco. (Vance blurbed Posobiec’s book: “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”)

What does one do with “vermin,” “the enemy within,” “unhumans,” and people who are “no longer American?” The question answers itself.

This has antecedents in the American tradition, most notably in the Lost Cause and the anti-immigration movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the South’s loss in the Civil War, southern partisans crafted a narrative of civilizational collapse caused by the efforts of Reconstruction to provide freed Blacks equal rights ― including voting rights ― under the law. This mythos emphasized the need for violent rebellion through vigilantism to restore a traditional way of life (white supremacy) that had been taken by an illegitimate government. It sought to “idealize the social order of the Old South, and to justify a new phase of political violence to restore that order,” Richard Slotkin, author of “A Great Disorder: National Myth And The Battle For America,” writes. The Lost Cause would provide narrative power to the establishment of the Jim Crow system, and the violence enacted against anyone who dared challenge it or, worst of all, try to exercise their legal rights.

Beyond the South, Northerners pressed a similar ideology against migrant communities, applying the anti-Black racism of the South to the increasing numbers of immigrants moving to Northern cities in search of jobs in the growing industrial economy.

“Universal suffrage” for freed Blacks, “swarms of foreigners” and women “is destructive both to the purity and significance of the ballot,” so no one “can place any faith in that form of suffrage,” Charles Francis Adams Jr. wrote in 1869.

These exclusionary narratives have been used time after time to maintain racial and ethnic hierarchies, and perpetrate human rights abuses.

And that is what is, again, at stake today as Trump resurrects this mythical narrative of an exclusionary state for our time.

This narrative of victimization and decline provides the grounding for the policies he hopes to enact. That includes a sweeping mass deportation campaign never before seen in the country that is aimed at legal and undocumented immigrants alike. This program will no doubt sweep up U.S. citizens into its net and violate constitutional and human rights. He has called for investigations and prosecutions of political opponents, election workers, and anyone who stands in his way. He wants to deploy the military to crush any sign of protest against his rule. And he has shown that he does not believe that Americans who do not vote for him should have their votes counted.

Trump’s “MAGA-dominated Republican Party [is] determined to fight for its cultural Lost Cause … [while] the prevalence of ethnonationalism in MAGA ideology threatens the solidarity of the nation as a community; its authoritarian and illiberal characters threatens to override the rules and structures that have governed democratic politics,” Slotkin writes.

While Trump has provided a narrative myth to provide significance and justification for action in the face of the collapse of the country’s existing national myth, liberals have not found a new way to explain what the country should mean.

It is not that liberals or the left should jettison Lincoln’s myth in the Gettysburg Address. Rather, they must translate its meaning for a new generation.

The attempts to create national unity under a foreign policy of democracy promotion seen in Ukraine have failed, while the dumb, deaf and blind support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have further proved the shattered nature of the liberal international order that is supposedly upheld by the world’s democracies. It is time for something different.

To counter the forces of myth propelling Trump, liberals and the left must not abandon the idea that this country is conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. They must recall that they exist in the context of all that came before, but also aim to be unburdened by what has been.