No president in the history of the Republic has used the word “America” as effectively as Donald Trump — not as a symbol to invoke unity but as kerosene to keep the home fires of our culture wars burning.
America, America: Make it great. It already is great. Keep it great. America must. America will. America First. “America,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the driver of much of his nativist domestic policy, “is for Americans and Americans only.”
But what does it mean to be an American if armed, masked men can sweep anybody, citizen or not, off the street, forcing people into unmarked S.U.V.s — to be, if Mr. Trump has his way, disappeared to remote Louisiana or taken to a prison camp in El Salvador?
Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship. His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.
Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill. Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said — not debt, not Medicaid cuts — compared to securing “ICE money.” Now, the agency — which already acts like a secret police — will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations.
Mr. Trump’s war on citizenship goes hand in hand with his politicization of the name of America, and though the first is unprecedented in its intensity, the second taps into a long, well, American tradition, one as old as the nation itself.
During the first half of the 1700s, most people living in the Western Hemisphere referred to the entire New World as America. Then, around the 1760s, in reaction to the British crown’s efforts to establish tighter control over its American possessions, dissident British subjects started using America in two senses, to mean both the New World and their sliver of that world, the narrow slip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea.
In 1777, the Articles of Confederation named the new country the United States of America but also referred to it as just America. That rhetorical conflation of the entire New World with one part of that world was aspirational, for many in the United States expected the nation to encompass the entire hemisphere, or at least soon reach the Pacific Ocean.
George Washington was among the first to appropriate America exclusively for the United States: “The name of American,” he told U.S. citizens in his 1796 Farewell Address, “belongs to you.” In contrast, the revolutionaries who sought to throw off Spanish rule did not claim the name America as their own.
For them, America symbolized not nationalism but internationalism. The Colombian political leader Francisco de Paula Santander wrote in 1818 that it mattered little where, exactly, he was born, for he “is nothing less than an American, and my country is any corner of America that isn’t ruled by the Spanish.” Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan revolutionary who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule, hoped that a free America — all of it — would lead humanity into a future ruled by law and justice.
Some within the United States shared this vision. In his 1821 Fourth of July oratory, John Quincy Adams previewed the kind of optimistic patriotism later associated with presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, saying that “America” gave the world the principles of “equal liberty, of equal justice and of equal rights.”
Adams’s vision was more hopeful than real. In the decades to come, slavery expanded, Indian removal and westward expansion accelerated and a bellicose nationalism, the kind today represented by MAGA, found its voice.
Adams watched in despair at what he called the “Anglo-Saxon, slaveholding exterminator of Indians” became a heroic national archetype. The momentum for war against Mexico built, especially after white “Texian” slaver-settlers broke free in 1836 from Mexican rule. Texans sharped the supremacist edge of white identity in opposition to Mexico, in the fantasy held by many that the new Texas Republic was just a steppingstone to turning the entire continent into a homeland for Anglo-Saxons. The Lone Star flag, said Texas’ president, Sam Houston, would be “borne by the Anglo-Saxon race” over Mexico and Central America. “Americanize this continent” by “the sword,” urged Ashbel Smith, another Texas statesman and slaver.
Battle-bred Anglo-Saxonism became, as Adams feared, a driving feature of Americanism, its virtues defined against the imagined vices of Spanish Americans. “Good, stable, just, equal, republican government will never exist in the Spanish republics,” wrote The New York Morning Herald in 1839, “until the Anglo‑Saxon race shall have possession of the reins of government over all South America.” The new Spanish American republics were, in other words, the world’s original “shithole” countries.
The United States annexed Texas in 1845 and then, the following year, invaded Mexico. By 1848, the U.S. Army had won the war, and though there were many excitable expansionists in favor of seizing “all Mexico,” the opposing opinion of Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina won the day. Calhoun warned that incorporating the “mixed races” of Mexico into the United States would undermine “Caucasian” rule.
The United States couldn’t take them in as citizens. “Ours is the government of the white man,” Calhoun said. And there were too many Mexicans to make slaves. Congress limited itself to taking just Mexico’s less densely populated northern half.
Spanish America came up with a lasting response to Anglo-Saxonism, following William Walker’s 1855 invasion of Nicaragua. Walker, a Tennessean mercenary allied with Southern slavers, failed in his bid to “Americanize” Nicaragua, but his actions so outraged Spanish Americans that they began to talk of there being two irreconcilable Americas. Affixing the adjective “Latin” to America, they cast themselves as more humanist, spiritual and attuned to the social interdependence of human existence than their grubbing, individualistic, egotistic, conquering, enslaving “Saxon” neighbors to the north.
Today, the use of “America” to refer to the United States has become routine; most English speakers use it without hostile intent. Still, many Latin Americans bristle when representatives of the United States claim the name America as if there were no Latin America. And when someone like Mr. Miller says “America is for Americans,” the malice is palpable.
Writing in 1971, the Uruguayan journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano declared: “We’ve lost the right to call ourselves Americans.” Mr. Galeano was literate and urbane, but the poorer, mostly rural Mexicans who have crossed our Southern border for more than a century looking for work have had similar complaints. The Mexican norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, sings that the entire New World is “America,” and that “all those born here are Americans.” “We are more American,” goes another of the band’s songs, “than the Anglo-Saxon’s son.” Los Tigres is wildly popular among migrants, who today are stalked by ICE and whose children born on United States soil will, if Mr. Trump gets his way, be denied citizenship.
When the United States broke free of Colonial rule 249 years ago, it helped bring forth, as Adams said on a long-ago Fourth of July, modern principles of equality and justice. But it also conjured a backlash to those principles. Chattel slavery expanded monstrously, while race wars on the frontier nurtured the idea that the United States was not the equal of other nations: It was above, and it was better than the other new republics that made up “America.”
The ideologues at the core of Trumpism continue this tradition, imagining “America” as the heartland of a besieged Anglo-Saxonism. As in the 1840s, their shared fixation is Mexico. Then, the “great Teuton race” was spreading out, as the U.S. envoy to Mexico wrote on the eve of the Mexican American War, and would soon “pervade the continent.” Now it is turned inward, hunkered down behind a wall and urging the White House to crack down harder on migrants.
The fight over the meaning of America reveals MAGA nationalism for what it is: the latest expression of Anglo-Saxon supremacy — a desire to dominate the world, but not be held accountable by the world.
Who gets to call themselves American in Mr. Trump’s America? Ask Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen who was stopped by Border Patrol on June 12. Agents pushed him face first into a black metal fence as they demanded to know which hospital he was born in. “I’m American, bro!” Mr. Gavidia answered. “We are not safe, guys,” he later said, “not safe in America today.”
Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale and the author, of “America, América.”
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