Trump Wants to Define the US by Its Past. Americans Don’t
Only MAGA seeks a ‘Christian nation’ shielding whites from immigrants.
Nearly 10 years ago, before Donald Trump hijacked American politics, I interviewed a leading Republican who viewed his party’s presidential front-runner with barely-concealed contempt.
House Speaker Paul Ryan mocked Trump’s pledge that Mexico would finance his border wall. More fundamentally, he contrasted the candidate’s noxious immigration message with America’s founding principle of equality, opportunity, and liberty for all.
“This is the first nation built on an idea, not on an identity,” Ryan told me. “Not on an identity on class, on race, on religion – on an idea … That’s what’s great about this country.”
Today’s Republican Party, reshaped by Trump, does not believe that. His radical presidency now tests whether the rest of America does.
The country has moved toward this moment for years, as demographic change brings us inexorably toward becoming a majority-minority nation. In the realm of “identity politics,” now a commonplace pejorative, it involves the biggest issue of all: the identity of America itself.
The struggle has flared throughout our history. Waves of immigration, the abolition of slavery, and the civil rights movement all triggered fierce opposition from white Protestants fearing change and seeking to protect their cultural primacy.
Groups such as the mid-19th century Know-Nothings (targeting Irish-Catholic immigrants) and the early 20th century Ku Klux Klan (targeting Blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews) mounted the most virulent resistance. Broader swaths of the country shared their unease about the society’s evolution.
But they’ve never erased the message inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And by the late 20th century, conservative Republican icon Ronald Reagan reinforced them by providing legal status to three million undocumented immigrants.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan explained, quoting a constituent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
“Thanks to each new wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity,” he concluded, “we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.”
Trump first won the presidency by rejecting the sentiments of Reagan and Ryan. His second presidency rejects them in ever-uglier terms.
He scorns immigrants from “shithole countries” he called “filthy, dirty, disgusting” – citing Somali-Americans. He deploys masked paramilitaries to chase down Latinos. He targets efforts large and small to remedy disadvantage among Blacks, even ending free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and instead making his own birthday admission-free.
His administration’s objective sits in plain sight. Its recently-published National Security Strategy warns that Europe risks “civilizational erasure” if it becomes “majority non-European.” Trump stokes that same panic about America.
While halting most immigration, Trump makes an exception for whites from South Africa, once-infamous for its white supremacist political system known as apartheid. His close ally Elon Musk, a South Africa native, (falsely) claims whites there face “genocide.”
Musk’s father, who defends apartheid as some on the American far-right downplay the evils of slavery, warns of disaster if US whites become out-numbered. “You want to go back to the jungle?” Errol Musk asked a CNN interviewer.
Trump acolytes in Congress echo the warning. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama insists Muslims are “here to conquer” and advocates deporting them.
“Not all cultures are equal,” adds Florida Rep. Randy Fine. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri defines Americans as “the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
As every schoolchild learns, our Constitution forbids establishment of a national religion. But the diminished dominance of white Christians, who have fallen from more than 80% of the population to less than 50% in Trump’s lifetime, creates an ample audience for demagoguery.
Consider the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. Seven in 10 of those PRRI calls “MAGA Republicans” say being a US-born Christian is important to being “truly American,” and that whites face as much discrimination as Blacks, according to data the organization provided to me.
Seven in ten MAGA Republicans don’t think immigrants should have “basic rights and protections” in the courts, and support masked ICE agents hunting them in unmarked vehicles. Seven in 10 want immigrants without legal status placed in internment camps before deportation.
Seven in ten agree that “immigrants are invading our country.” Among MAGA Republicans, a 55% majority wants the government to “declare America a Christian nation.”
But keep those numbers in perspective. In the PRRI survey, MAGA Republicans represent just 27% of the population. They’re dramatically out of step with everyone else.
Among the other 73%, seven in ten prefer an America with a wide variety of religious faiths. Seven in ten say newcomers from abroad strengthen our society. Seven in 10 oppose ICE’s tactics, and say Trump is assaulting constitutional checks and balances and the rule of law.
In the final speech of his presidency, Reagan hailed America’s commitment to “breathe life into dreams” of immigrants. “Other countries,” he lamented, “cling to the stale past.”
Trump wants to define America by its past. But most Americans don’t, and as 2025 concludes, they still hold the power to stop him.
John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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This is so insightful and almost thorough. And yet can this moment really be understood without looking back to the dispossession and in many cases genocide of Native people? Hitler himself was such a fanboy of Andrew Jackson and his Trail of Tears, going so far as to say the Volga would be "our Mississippi." Doesn't this matter to the moment we're in? Isn't is the root of our racial and gendered capitalism?
Orwell writing almost 80 years ago and not having anyway to know what technology would be available, definitely got it right! Maybe not the date which was just an inversion of 1948 but all the key components of where authoritarianism was going!
He who controls the present controls the past
He who controls the past controls the future