Frosty, I also love America's democratic republic. Trump doesn't.

Donald Trump Hates America, the rest of us can love America well.

By David Brooks

So apparently Donald Trump wants to make this an election about what it means to be American. He’s got his vision of what it means to be American, and he’s challenging the rest of us to come up with a better one.

In Trump’s version, “American” is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.

When you look at Trump’s American idea you realize that it contradicts the traditional American idea in every particular. In fact, Trump’s national story is much closer to the Russian national story than it is toward our own. It’s an alien ideology he’s trying to plant on our soil.

Trump’s vision is radically anti-American.

The real American idea is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one — E pluribus unum (out of many, one).

The Puritans settled this continent with visions of creating a future city on a hill. They had an eschatological dream of completing God’s plan for this earth. By the time of the revolution it was well understood that America was the land of futurity, the vanguard nation that would lead all of humanity to a dignified and democratic future.

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” John Adams declared, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

American life is so raucous and dynamic because people are inflamed by visions of creating a heaven on earth. As George Santayana put it, Americans often don’t make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. In building material wealth, they see themselves creating a country that will redeem humanity, that will become the last best hope of earth.

This sense of mission has often made Americans arrogant, and somewhat dangerous to be around. But it has also made us anxious. The country was built amid a wail of jeremiads: Providence assigned us a mission to serve the whole planet, but we, in our greed and sin, are blowing it! “Ah my country!” Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, “In thee is the reasonable hope of mankind not fulfilled.”

But the American mission survived its failures. Herman Melville summarized the ethos in his novel “White Jacket”: “God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. … We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path.”

Again and again, Americans have felt called upon to launch off into new frontiers — to design a democracy, to create a new kind of democratic person, to settle the West, to industrialize, to pioneer new technologies, to explore space, to combat prejudice, to fight totalitarianism and spread democracy. The mission was always the same: to leap into the future, to give life meaning and shape by extending opportunity and dignity to all races and nations.

This American idea is not a resentful prejudice; it’s a faith and a dream. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch put it best: “Only ‘America,’ of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth.

“But only the ‘American Way,’ of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only ‘American’ has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”

Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet — a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear.

Americans have always been divided on where they came from, but united in their vision of their common future. They’ve been bonded by the vision of creating a pluralistic home in which everybody can belong and be seen. Or as Langston Hughes wrote: “America never was America to me/And yet I swear this oath/America will be!”

Slats, there are things Trump supporters do not support about Trump. We recognize a fallible man. The good attributes we can stand behind and fully support. There are many good attributes and qualities about Trump. The difference between us is that the manufactured Trump hate causes TDS which says there is nothing good about Trump.

If Democrats win the next election there will never be a free and fair federal election again and the Republic is finished, dead. It's already been horribly damaged by the Marxist mob and it's questionable that it is still recoverable. I honestly do not know how to define the form of government we're currently living under; no rule of law equals no Republic. I do know that the Marxist Left has probed and proven the weaknesses in our Constitution and used it to their advantage and to America's peril.

Frosty, I also love America's democratic republic. Trump doesn't.

Donald Trump Hates America, the rest of us can love America well.

By David Brooks

So apparently Donald Trump wants to make this an election about what it means to be American. He’s got his vision of what it means to be American, and he’s challenging the rest of us to come up with a better one.

In Trump’s version, “American” is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.

When you look at Trump’s American idea you realize that it contradicts the traditional American idea in every particular. In fact, Trump’s national story is much closer to the Russian national story than it is toward our own. It’s an alien ideology he’s trying to plant on our soil.

Trump’s vision is radically anti-American.

The real American idea is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one — E pluribus unum (out of many, one).

The Puritans settled this continent with visions of creating a future city on a hill. They had an eschatological dream of completing God’s plan for this earth. By the time of the revolution it was well understood that America was the land of futurity, the vanguard nation that would lead all of humanity to a dignified and democratic future.

“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” John Adams declared, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

American life is so raucous and dynamic because people are inflamed by visions of creating a heaven on earth. As George Santayana put it, Americans often don’t make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. In building material wealth, they see themselves creating a country that will redeem humanity, that will become the last best hope of earth.

This sense of mission has often made Americans arrogant, and somewhat dangerous to be around. But it has also made us anxious. The country was built amid a wail of jeremiads: Providence assigned us a mission to serve the whole planet, but we, in our greed and sin, are blowing it! “Ah my country!” Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented, “In thee is the reasonable hope of mankind not fulfilled.”

But the American mission survived its failures. Herman Melville summarized the ethos in his novel “White Jacket”: “God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. … We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path.”

Again and again, Americans have felt called upon to launch off into new frontiers — to design a democracy, to create a new kind of democratic person, to settle the West, to industrialize, to pioneer new technologies, to explore space, to combat prejudice, to fight totalitarianism and spread democracy. The mission was always the same: to leap into the future, to give life meaning and shape by extending opportunity and dignity to all races and nations.

This American idea is not a resentful prejudice; it’s a faith and a dream. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch put it best: “Only ‘America,’ of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth.

“But only the ‘American Way,’ of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only ‘American’ has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”

Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet — a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear.

Americans have always been divided on where they came from, but united in their vision of their common future. They’ve been bonded by the vision of creating a pluralistic home in which everybody can belong and be seen. Or as Langston Hughes wrote: “America never was America to me/And yet I swear this oath/America will be!”

Imagine if you will that in November 1863, Donald Trump had delivered the original Gettysburg Address:


Four score and seven years ago, my grandfather came to this country but don’t mention that he was an immigrant. Then his son, my father, brought me into his business and with his small loan of millions and generous coverage of my losses, helped me start my own business and bring forth many real estate projects and a reality TV show, conceived in ego, profit and product placement and dedicated to the proposition that only I am in charge and everyone else is a loser.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, which, by the way, I was totally opposed to, ask anyone, but I will win because I know more than any of the generals. We are met on a great battlefield of that war and I have come here to dedicate the new Trump Gettysburg hotel and golf resort, which will also include a plaque to those who gave their lives here because after all, the veterans are so important and it’s sad that no one else realizes that. So my new resort here is altogether fitting and proper because I say so.

But, in a larger sense, the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, are losers, too. The world will little note, nor long remember what they did here, but it can never forget what I’ve built here because it is better than anything you have ever seen before. Check out the marble in that lobby.

We also should be dedicated here to the unfinished work of the previous presidents who were so crooked and never got anything done because they know nothing about business and are weak and corrupt. The task remaining before us is to Make America Great Again, which it was before we got so politically correct about slaves and abolitionists constantly disrupted my rallies. I’d like to punch them right in the face.

So I resolve as no one else has that the dead here shall not have died in vain even though, as I said, they are losers, plus the other side tried to rig this whole war thing. But now that the battle’s done with, we can move on and make sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people goes away because it’s a stupid idea that must have come from some nasty woman.

Thank you. May God bless America — and me.

Imagine if you will that in November 1863, Donald Trump had delivered the original Gettysburg Address:


Four score and seven years ago, my grandfather came to this country but don’t mention that he was an immigrant. Then his son, my father, brought me into his business and with his small loan of millions and generous coverage of my losses, helped me start my own business and bring forth many real estate projects and a reality TV show, conceived in ego, profit and product placement and dedicated to the proposition that only I am in charge and everyone else is a loser.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, which, by the way, I was totally opposed to, ask anyone, but I will win because I know more than any of the generals. We are met on a great battlefield of that war and I have come here to dedicate the new Trump Gettysburg hotel and golf resort, which will also include a plaque to those who gave their lives here because after all, the veterans are so important and it’s sad that no one else realizes that. So my new resort here is altogether fitting and proper because I say so.

But, in a larger sense, the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, are losers, too. The world will little note, nor long remember what they did here, but it can never forget what I’ve built here because it is better than anything you have ever seen before. Check out the marble in that lobby.

We also should be dedicated here to the unfinished work of the previous presidents who were so crooked and never got anything done because they know nothing about business and are weak and corrupt. The task remaining before us is to Make America Great Again, which it was before we got so politically correct about slaves and abolitionists constantly disrupted my rallies. I’d like to punch them right in the face.

So I resolve as no one else has that the dead here shall not have died in vain even though, as I said, they are losers, plus the other side tried to rig this whole war thing. But now that the battle’s done with, we can move on and make sure that government of the people, by the people, for the people goes away because it’s a stupid idea that must have come from some nasty woman.

Thank you. May God bless America — and me.