Donald Trump Is Changing What It Means To Be 'American'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : ""I will give you everything," Trump said in 2016.
62% : "For nearly 10 years, Americans have sought to understand Trump, the intellectual currents that sustain his political rise and the MAGA movement that adores him.
48% : Andthat is what is, again, at stake today as Trump resurrects this mythical narrative of an exclusionary state for our time.
46% : "Creedal nationalism was an attempt to explain the continuity of American institutions despite the transformation of its population," Samuel Goldman writes in his 2021 book, "After Nationalism.
43% : But the key to understanding what Trump means is to look at the national myth that became the national creed following World War II in the 20th century: the "electric chord" that bound the nation, and that has since been broken.
38% : Following the Jan. 6 attack, I wrote that "Trump's supporters were not taking his words either literally or seriously, they were taking them mythically."What Trump has sought to do ever since he descended the Trump Tower escalator -- whether he knew it himself or not -- is to supplant our country's national political mythos and replace it with his own new spin on a very old story.
32% : Back in 2016, the media was told by conservatives, like journalist Salena Zito and far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to take Trump "seriously, not literally."
28% : While Trump has provided a narrative myth to provide significance and justification for action in the face of the collapse of the country's existing national myth, liberals have not found a new way to explain what the country should mean.
26% : It is this myth that Trump and his allies are arrayed against.
26% : Trump moved to fill the vacuum with a narrative of decadence, decline and civilizational collapse that he "alone" could fix.
23% : The U.S. is a "garbage can," Trump says, that has been "invaded and conquered" by "murderers, rapists, and illegal criminals" and "vermin" with "bad genes" who are "poisoning the blood of our country" thanks to the machinations of his political foes -- "the enemy within."
8% : The problem that many observers have had in understanding Trump, is that they have been making a category error in trying to make sense of Trump by the normal means of fact-based interpretation.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.