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The nation is about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding, but few people expect a true moment of unity.
That’s partly because of the polarizing nature of President Trump, whose capacity to inspire love from his supporters and loathing from his detractors remains unequaled by any other contemporary political figure.
But it’s also because conservative and liberal America have starkly different views on fundamental questions of what the nation should be — and who is to be considered a full member of it.
Those clashing visions manifest themselves most obviously on the issue of immigration — as was vividly seen this week in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship.
Liberals hailed the outcome, which upheld the view that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, as a much-needed reaffirmation of constitutional rights. Conservatives lambasted it as a betrayal that will usher in a further dilution of America’s essential character.
But that debate is only one strand in the bigger issue of how the U.S. should be defined and what qualities the nation should represent.
National arguments about Trump’s expansive view of presidential power and the appropriateness, or otherwise, of vigorous displays of political dissent are part of the picture, too.
Amid all of that, the accusation of being “un-American” is hurled around with abandon from every quarter.
Trump has often used the term to describe legal and political opponents.
While out of power, he complained about the “unAmerican Weaponization of our Law Enforcement,” of which he saw himself as a victim.
His opponents say the reverse is true, arguing that he is traducing the traditional independence of the justice system as his administration pursues critics including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).
Trump just as frequently accuses critics of “hating” the nation, a charge that has rarely been made by other presidents of the modern era.
“It is despicable and unAmerican for Liberals and the Mainstream Media to hate our Country so much,” Trump alleged last year amid criticism of the administration in the infamous case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador despite an earlier court order specifically barring that from happening.
Meanwhile, critics of Trump — mostly, but not exclusively liberal — have described as “un-American” a plethora of the president’s attitudes and actions.
The label has been applied to his perceived disregard for due process, the widespread cuts to government undertaken in conjunction with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the president’s alleged fondness for “crony capitalism”, and his “fake patriotism” — among other things.
The nature of patriotism is very much under the spotlight amid the Fourth of July celebrations marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Trump appears to view patriotism as close to synonymous with support of him.
When several musical performers pulled out of planned performances in the nation’s capital to mark the anniversary — largely because they faced the perception that they were implicitly supporting Trump — the president announced a change of plans.
“We are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a “TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,” he wrote in a social media post on June 15.
In the same post, he noted that music for the event would come from military bands and orchestras as well as his own “playlist” — and not from “those people that put you to sleep and constantly complain!”
Yet it is precisely this conflation of the president with the nation at large that alarms and outrages Trump’s critics.
They have hit out at other elements of the anniversary celebrations as crass and self-glorifying, too — notably a night of UFC bouts held on the South Lawn of the White House on Trump’s birthday, June 14.
Undergirding all of this is a debate about what patriotism actually means.
For Trump and his supporters, it looks like a nationalistic affirmation of the U.S.’s exceptionalism and a defense of its reputation against those who they believe are too eager to condemn the country’s historical record.
It’s no coincidence that the song most associated with Trump’s rallies, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” insists on “pride in every American heart/And it’s time we stand and say/That I’m proud to be an American/Where at least I know I’m free.”
But voices on the left argue that dissent is itself an act of patriotism, citing a long lineage of figures from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. who have called on the U.S. to live up to the promise of its ideals.
This, broadly speaking, is the view held by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), a democratic socialist.
Mamdani, who will deliver his own speech Friday to mark the Independence Day holiday, expressly took aim at the “love it or leave it” school of patriotism in an interview published by The New York Times on Thursday.
“Patriotism is not pretending our country has no flaws. It is loving our country enough to fight for fulfillment of its ideals,” Mamdani told the Times. “The freedoms we enjoy were not handed down; they were won. And we have many more to win.”
Others argue that inherent tensions are likely to come to the fore this weekend amid the Trump-centric celebrations.
“It’s ironic to have a very strong president asserting [his] ideas when, at the same time, centralizing power is literally antithetical to what the whole founding was about: a country based on separating and balancing power,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
Zelizer added, “President Trump believes power should be vested in him and in his office in a way that is not the way the system was set up.”
Trump and his allies would of course hit back at that interpretation. In doing so, they continue the debate as to what is, and is not, truly American.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
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