Paul Blumenthal is a senior reporter with the HuffPost Politics team based in Washington, D.C. He covers courts, elections, political economy and political history.
Former President Donald Trump 's apocalyptic vision of America is a myth of decline, decay and decadence that only he can overcome.has cast the United States, yet again, as a nation in decline mired by chaos, violence, internal subversion and subjugation.
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. And they’ve tried to understand why he defies what were once the normal rules of politics. Scandals, whether it be his crude and insulting statements, the many allegations of sexual assault levied against him or his naked corruption, deflect off of him.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address announced a revolution in American thought. Instead of locating the founding of the country with the 1787 adoption of the Constitution, 76 years prior, he argued that the nation’s true founding came with the adoption of the Declaration and its principle that “all men are created equal.” Instead of rooting national identity in white Anglo-Saxon heritage, he rooted it in principle.
This American Creed emerged as the consensus view of American nationalism in the 20th century. It came about due to the ideological nature of the war against Nazi Germany, domestic and international pressure to resolve the oppression of Black Americans, and a push for greater integration and acknowledgement of the immigrants who had immigrated in large numbers at the turn of the 20th century.
His own vice presidential nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance rather explicitly took on creedal interpretations of American identity in his acceptance speech where he drew a picture of his family’s cemetery plot in Kentucky. This is by no means new to American conservatism. The Lost Cause ideology that emerged out of the South following the Civil War explicitly rejected equality as the basis of American identity. This rejection of equality was joined by Northerners who saw inspiration in southern anti-Black racism to oppose and restrict immigration by non-“Nordic” Europeans.
Trump speaks during a Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 3, 2020.
And that becomes evident in its absence, too: Amid multiple crises and changing material conditions in the country, the American creedal myth that long sustained the country seemingly ceased to provide meaning for many Americans.Trump moved to fill the vacuum with a narrative of decadence, decline and civilizational collapse that he “alone” could fix. This apocalyptic vision mobilized supporters to believe that the end times were not just nigh, but already happening.
The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was the culmination of Trump's myth. His narrative of decline provided the grounding to justify violence.This has antecedents in the American tradition, most notably in the Lost Cause and the anti-immigration movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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