The age of Donald Trump and the future of American democracy are dominated by a question: What does it mean to be a real American, and who gets to decide?
One answer is embodied by the nearly 1 million people who choose to become naturalized Americans each year. At the end of that journey, they receive an American flag, copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, their citizenship papers — and a welcome letter from the president.
Traditionally, these letters offer a hopeful and inclusive vision of what it means to be an American: A member of a political community defined not by creed or fixed attributes, but by shared values and belief in democracy and the American experiment.
President Ronald Reagan famously articulated this vision in 1988: “You can live in Germany, Turkey or Japan, but you can’t become a German, a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the earth, can come live in America and become an American.”
Last week, President Donald Trump released his version of the letter given to naturalized Americans — and it must be said that his welcome letter is not that welcoming. He is, symbolically and ideologically, the country’s first White president, and his understanding of what it means to be an American is very different from his predecessors.
Last week, President Trump released his version of the letter given to naturalized Americans — and it must be said that his welcome letter is not that welcoming. He is, symbolically and ideologically, the country’s first White president, and his understanding of what it means to be an American is very different from his predecessors.
The letter is full of unmemorable bromides and has none of the moving language used by Reagan and other presidents. Rather than highlighting how immigrants and their contributions have made America great and exceptional, Trump’s letter stresses obligations and responsibilities, focusing on what the U.S. has given these new citizens.
James Edwards, a political communication expert who studies presidential messaging at naturalization ceremonies, told NPR that Trump’s message “[F]its into his larger narrative, but that’s not usually what you see at an American naturalization ceremony…It’s much more of a celebration, and I’m not saying that Trump doesn’t celebrate those ideas, but it’s less celebratory than his predecessors…There’s no heterogeneity, there’s no celebration of diversity, there’s no celebration of past immigrants.”
Instead of trumpeting on “ideas or ideals” as the core focus of America’s vision, the president’s letter points to “culture and tradition,” David Graham observed in The Atlantic. “For Trump, the nation is less a melting pot where different cultures combine harmoniously than a crucible where foreign notions are burned off and a homogenous mix emerges,” he wrote. “It’s also a move away from a focus on the intellectual underpinnings of the American project, which was an essential message for past presidents, regardless of party.”
Trump’s new letter to naturalized Americans reflects how he is growing in power as the country’s first White President. As Graham pointed out, there is “no emphasis on collective bonding,” which he nodded to in the letter used in his first term. “And where Trump used the word nation only once in his first term, he mentions it four times now, capitalized each time. (Neither letter uses the word immigrant, as Obama’s did, much less calls the United States a ‘nation of immigrants,’ as Biden’s did.)” Graham observed that outside the U.S., “nation” is often irrevocably tied to ethnicity, and “the conceptual shift…is part of a broader rhetorical change on the right.”
The letter must be understood as part of a revolutionary right-wing political and social project: One where a real American is white and patriotism means loyalty to Trump and his MAGA movement. Nonwhite people can aspire to that identity, but their acceptance is conditional on aligning with Whiteness and its norms.
Many other examples illustrate how these boundaries of “real American” identity are defined and policed. Trump has described “illegal aliens,” “migrants,” and other “undesirables” and “vermin,” as poison in “the blood” of the nation. His mass deportation plan amounts to a national “purification” project, and his embrace of the Great Replacement Theory — the racist like that white people are being replaced by Black and brown people — is perhaps the best illustration of just how closely the president and his MAGA ideology are tied to racism, nativism, racial authoritarianism and social dominance behavior.
The Trump administration is also engaging in an Orwellian program to whitewash American history, erasing the accomplishments of Black and brown Americans, women, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups. What remains is a flattened, inaccurate history that centers white heterosexual Christian men as the architects of American greatness, relegating others to mere bystanders or occupying passive, supporting roles. A clear example of this regressive vision is the administration’s push to rewrite the 14th Amendment in their efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship and undermine equal protection under the law.
At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security has been posting images to its social media channels that are rooted in far-right themes and ideology. In June, the department shared an image of Uncle Sam nailing to a wall a poster that read “Help yourself…and your country.” Beneath the placard was another message: “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS,” which was accompanied by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement hotline. On Monday, DHS shared a print of workmen constructing the Statue of Liberty’s torch above New York Harbor. “PROTECTED YOUR HOMELAND DEFEND YOUR CULTURE,” it read.
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In total, Trumpism models limited, circumscribed versions of citizenship and political belonging known as blood and soil nationalism, where racial stock determines human worth, rights and citizenship. These values and beliefs are inherently incompatible with multiracial democracy and a more cosmopolitan, dynamic and inclusive country.
Trump’s Sept. 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly provided him a huge platform to articulate these beliefs about non-white invaders and other existential threats to white Christian civilization. As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir wrote, Trump’s speech was a stream of “overtly racist and xenophobic paranoia” that cast America as an “isolationist fortress of embattled white pride.”
Trump accused the U.N. of “not even coming close to living up” to its global mission, and mocked it for writing “really strongly worded” letters full of “empty words” that do nothing to resolve international conflict. You could almost hear international observers gritting their teeth and nodding along: No lies detected! But if most of them agreed with that diagnosis, virtually none of them want any part of the Trumpian remedy, which seems to involve closing all international borders, repelling or expelling migrants from all European or “Christian” countries (i.e., the ones with largely white populations)…
Public opinion polls generally show that the American people, albeit with certain qualifiers and conditions, believe that legal immigration is a net positive for the country. A majority also view Trump’s mass deportation program as needlessly cruel and reckless. Yet despite disagreement with its specifics, many support his “get tough” stance on illegal immigration. The issue remains highly polarized: Most Republicans and MAGA supporters back Trump’s approach, most Democrats oppose it and independents are skeptical of the cruelty.
On the question of diversity, a 2023 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, “Overall, half of Americans (51%) believe that the increasing diversity of the United States makes it a better place to live — including three-quarters of Democrats (73%), half of Independents (48%), and three in ten Republicans (30%).” Meanwhile, 33% of Republicans said diversity makes the country worse, compared to 17% of Independents and just 6% of Democrats.
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For the vast majority of its history, America has literally been white by law due to white on Black chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, genocide and land theft against First Nations peoples, pogroms, ethnic cleansing and other massive violence targeting Black Americans and other non-whites, and many other acts of institutional, systemic and interpersonal racism and racial animus.
This is the very history the Trump administration is erasing.
Its mass deportation campaign and xenophobic policies appear to be modeled on the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, as well as Supreme Court cases like Ozawa v. the United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which effectively banned immigration from nonwhite countries and restricted citizenship to white people. The quota system established by Johnson-Reed remained until 1965 during the heart of the civil rights era, which saw the tearing down of Jim and Jane Crow, along with the legislative triumphs of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).
Seen through a historically accurate lens, America has only been a multiracial democracy — and an aspirational one in progress — for about sixty years. Trump’s letter, his UN address and other policies are daily affirmations that he and his MAGA allies are seeking to return us to the country’s darkest past. In their eyes, being a real American means being the right kind of white American.
In Donald Trump’s America, all Americans are “equal” — but some are certainly more equal than others.
