Common Ground Is for Suckers
"Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States.
A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are just a little more American than others, and that this is a function of race, nationality and, above all, allegiance to Trump.
Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”
Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.
You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.
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“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, 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,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”
What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”
It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major American city. And if Trump were only targeting undocumented immigrants, he could look to cities in Texas and Florida as well as those in California and Illinois. But Trump targeted them all the same, sending the National Guard to occupy each city and unleashing federal immigration agents to harass and abuse immigrants and citizens alike.
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump mused on his Truth Social website in September. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The administration’s attack on Minnesota, and especially on the city of Minneapolis, is more of the same, less law enforcement than a combat operation aimed at a set of Americans whose governor opposed the president in the last election or who belong to a disfavored racial, ethnic and religious minority
At the risk of cliché, most presidents do not speak like this about their fellow Americans. The presidency is a national office, and even the bitterest struggles for this highest prize of American politics tend to end with an appeal to union and common ground from the eventual winner. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the wake of an election so hard fought that it nearly turned to violence. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”
John Quincy Adams won the presidency in what his chief rival, Andrew Jackson, condemned as a “corrupt bargain.” In his Inaugural Address, Adams made it a point to reach out to those Americans who wanted a different man in the White House. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” Adams said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”
Abraham Lincoln ended his first Inaugural Address with a famous appeal to the common history that tied Americans to one another. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he said. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Lincoln’s heartfelt call to his Southern brethren to heed “the mystic chords of memory” fell on deaf ears. Five weeks later, a South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter. Not long afterward, Union volunteers met soldiers from the newly formed Confederate States of America in a field just north of Manassas, Va. And so began four years of the worst bloodletting in American history.
Trump rejects this legacy of his predecessors. The rhetorical tools of the presidency are, for him, a means to divide Americans and sort them according to hierarchies of status. Trump sits atop the national government, but not as a national leader. His is the logic of the separatist, even of the secessionist. “There was no privilege without persecution, no winner without a loser,” Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison write of the ideology of the Southern “fire-eaters” in “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776.” In their worldview, “political relationships within nations were always hierarchical; some group was always enslaved by or beholden to some other more dominant group.”
The fire-eaters hoped to instantiate this vision in a new nation founded on a cornerstone of racial subjugation. But what if you could secede without secession? What if you could cleave the nation off from its egalitarian aspirations? What if you could bring the spirit of separatism to bear on a government tasked with representing a single people?
That is the Trump administration. That is the work of a White House that sees vast numbers of Americans not as friends, but as enemies. And that is a work of a president who will destroy as many symbols of national unity as he can to satisfy his bottomless ego, cruel appetites and unquenchable desire to “win” at the expense of the people he purports to lead.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
