Trumpism represents a repudiation of American exceptionalism
THE BIG IDEA: President Trump reportedly suggested that U.S. soldiers shoot immigrants in the legs to slow them down if they cross the southern border, one of several ideas that the same aides who implemented his family separation policy had to explain would be illegal.
Today’s New York Times reports that Trump’s proposal to wound migrants came during a private meeting after he faced blowback last fall for suggesting publicly that soldiers should shoot migrants if they threw rocks across the border.
“Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh,” according to Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld David. “When he ordered wall construction sped up, [then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen] said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us. … Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active.”
This is one in a myriad of examples of Trump pulling back from the principle of American exceptionalism. This guiding creed, which not long ago was a point of both national consensus and pride, maintains that, while imperfect, the United States is not just another country on the U.N. roster somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. Presidents of both parties have historically recognized the essential role that the United States plays as a special and unique beacon of freedom. We have strived to be the world’s moral backbone, a leading champion for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Even as previous leaders had to make uncomfortable compromises and partner with unsavory characters to advance the national interest, that self-conception and the welcoming attitude it entails have been steadfast.
But that’s not Trump’s worldview. He’s said so explicitly and repeatedly. More importantly, he’s demonstrated it through his actions and his embrace of false moral equivalency.
-- During an Oval Office meeting in 2017, for example, Trump told two senior Russian officials that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the presidential election because the United States does the same in other countries. That comment alarmed White House officials so much that they limited access to the summary of the meeting to an unusually small number of people. The intelligence community whistleblower alleged that the White House similarly placed the record of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, during which he pushed for an investigation of his political opponents, into the code-word classified system reserved for the most sensitive intelligence information. That is now part of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
“White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him,” my colleagues Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima reported Friday. “Another former official said Trump wasn’t the only one to conflate Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections with U.S. efforts to promote democracy and good governance abroad. The president and his top aides seemed not to understand the difference between Voice of America, a U.S.-supported news organization that airs in foreign countries, with Russian efforts to persuade American voters by surreptitiously planting ads in social media, this person said. … One former senior official said Trump regularly defended Russia’s actions, even in private, saying no country is pure. ‘He was always defensive of Russia,’ this person said … ‘He thought the whole interference thing was ridiculous. He never bought into it.’”
-- White House officials similarly restricted access to transcripts of the president’s calls with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his father, the king, in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. CNN reported Friday that putting the call summary into a system normally reserved for details of covert operations was highly unusual. Someone familiar with the call told the network that it contained no especially sensitive national security secrets, but a rough transcript was never circulated.
After Khashoggi was killed – one year ago today – Trump never distanced himself from Mohammed. Instead, he helped rehabilitate him on the world stage. The CIA’s assessment that MBS ordered the assassination of the Washington Post contributing columnist has not changed, but for Trump it was never worth jeopardizing arms sales. He has said the Middle East is a “vicious” place as he ensured Mohammed would not be treated like a pariah. “I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them,’” the president said in July. On this terrible anniversary, not a single Saudi official has been found guilty or punished for their role.
-- Trump does not subscribe to the notion that our history, our lower-case-r republican values and our unique constitutional system are distinguishing features that make America exceptional. Speaking to a tea party gathering in Texas in 2015, shortly before he launched his presidential campaign, a friendly moderator asked Trump to speak about the importance of American exceptionalism. In a two-minute answer, Trump noted seven times that he does not like the term as he rejected the premise that America is exceptional. “Look, if I’m a Russian or I’m a German or I’m a person we do business with, … I don’t think it’s a very nice term,” Trump said. “We’re exceptional; you’re not? First of all, Germany is eating our lunch. So they say, ‘Why are you exceptional? We’re doing a lot better than you.’ I never liked the term.”
The same month that Trump downplayed Russian election interference during his conversation with representatives of the Kremlin in the Oval Office, he dismissed concerns that Vladimir Putin is “a killer” during a Fox News interview. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” Trump said. “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
-- Michael Gerson, who was the chief speechwriter in George W. Bush’s White House, lamented in his column this week that we have “an American president who doesn’t understand the meaning of America.”: “He calls for the renewal of nationalism, but in a manner that has little to do with our national values. He wants us to take pride in blood and soil rather than in a set of universal ideals. His calls for loyalty are based on geography not morality. He urges us to love America because it is powerful, and because it is ours, not because it is good. In this sense, Trump seeks to normalize American nationalism — to make it more like the Russian or Chinese varieties. He invariably defines national goals in terms of exercising military dominance, or controlling access to resources, or maintaining national sovereignty, or achieving trade surpluses. And he seems to view this as an expression of realism about the nature of power.”
-- Following Trump’s lead, prominent figures in the Trumpist movement have also begun rejecting the concept of American exceptionalism. At a July conference on the future of “national conservatism,” PayPal co-founder and outspoken Trump supporter Peter Thiel said the doctrine has distracted the right for too long. The billionaire said America has become exceptional in bad ways: exceptionally overweight, exceptionally addicted to opioids, exceptionally expensive, exceptionally un-self-aware and exceptionally un-self-critical. According to notes taken by an attendee, Thiel argued that nationalism means being extremely critical, not unreflective, of America’s weaknesses to make the country great. (Conservative Ross Douthat responded with a column: “Trump’s Message: Love It or Leave It, With a Bigoted Edge,” he wrote. “A populist-nationalist corrective to American exceptionalism would be welcome. Trump’s version isn’t it.”)
-- The Hobbesian worldview underlying Trumpism is the polar opposite of “the shining city upon a hill” that Ronald Reagan always talked about. “If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here,” Reagan said in his farewell address 30 years ago.
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