Donald Trump Is Changing What It Means To Be 'American' | HuffPost Latest News

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 Amendments 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 theyve 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.

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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 Trumps 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 countrys national political mythos and replace it with his own new spin on a very old story.

The Electric Cord

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.

Lincolns 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 nations 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 countrys promise. A myth.