In their well-coordinated June counterstrike on Donald Trump — a response to his outrageous call, after the massacre in Orlando, Florida, to ban Muslims from entering the United States — President Obama and Hillary Clinton described the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, or, at least, his words, as un-American. "That's not the America we want. It doesn't reflect our democratic ideals," Obama argued.
It's a key component of the message Democrats have seized upon as they fight to retain control of the White House: that Trump stands as something wholly apart in our politics.
The president's words echoed those of first lady Michelle Obama, who took a similar rhetorical swipe at Trump a week earlier in her commencement speech at City College of New York.
"Despite the lessons of our history . . . some folks out there today seem to have a very different perspective. They seem to view our diversity as a threat to be contained rather than as a resource to be tapped. They tell us to be afraid of those who are different, to be suspicious of those with whom we disagree. They act as if name-calling is an acceptable substitute for thoughtful debate, as if anger and intolerance should be our default state rather than the optimism and openness that have always been the engine of our progress," she noted. "Graduates, that is not who we are. That is not what this country stands for."
Except it is.
Despite the insistence that Trump doesn't represent America's ideals, the historical truth is more complex and problematic. Trump's propensity for demonizing others — from Muslims to Mexican immigrants to federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel — and the us-vs.-them framing of his entire campaign (he even applied the tea party-esque "they took their country back" to the Brexit vote) has been around forever. If anything, he reminds Americans that no matter how far we've progressed, as a country, away from our worst impulses, they still lurk just beneath the surface, waiting to reemerge.
With his ominous promise to "make America great again" accompanying insensitive racial comments — "Oh, look at my African American over here!" — and racial violence at his rallies, Trump's campaign has given voice to the very worst that our history offers. When he says, "We are going to take our country back from those people," he suggests taking it back to times most Americans would rather forget. The bullying, imperiousness and ignorance he displays are, after all, as much a part of the American experience as the tolerance, amity, humility and ingenuity that helped overcome them.
Like the first lady, most Americans prefer those latter traits and think of the former as part of a receding American past. Trump, though, is not an aberration. There have always been competing undercurrents and ideologies that sought to, and often succeeded at, undermining the noble principles upon which the nation was founded and prevented America from fully realizing its self-proclaimed destiny to be a "city upon a hill." Whether calculated or inadvertent, one of the reasons Trump's candidacy is so consequential is that he's brought so many of those shameful undercurrents to the fore. Far from being a new phenomenon, the xenophobia and anti-immigrant hostility he projects are as old as the republic.
In 1798, not long after America's founding, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, significantly curtailing naturalization and giving the government broad powers to detain and deport foreign citizens. That was only the beginning: In the 1850s, the "Know-Nothings" rode a wave of success in many state legislatures thanks to their anti-Irish platform. The combination of anti-Catholicism, anti-Romanism (since loyalty to the Pope supposedly undermined democratic citizenship) and an appeal based on preserving supposed Anglo-Saxon purity helped stoke nativist animosities directed toward just about every other ethnic group.
In addition to the long list of exclusionary laws and agreements aimed at keeping out what the Populist Party's otherwise progressive 1892 Omaha platform called "undesirable emigration" – the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentleman's Agreement that effectively froze Japanese immigration and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that severely curtailed southern and eastern European immigration "to maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain on our people" — public hostility toward immigrants degenerated into violence all too often during this period. Wage disputes combined with a generalized fear of foreigners and foreign ideas like socialism made immigrant workers convenient scapegoats for labor and management in the bloody power struggle over the burgeoning industrial economy.
Just about every ethnic group has at one point or another come under attack: from Philadelphia's 1844 anti-Irish riots; through Louisville's 1855 "Bloody Monday" killings of German and Irish Catholics; Los Angeles's Chinatown, where, in 1871, a mob terrorized and murdered Chinese immigrants; the 1891 lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans; and the 1897 Pennsylvania coal country massacre of Slavic coal miners at the Lattimer mines.
During World War I, German Americans were targeted by the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918, while tens of thousands of Japanese Americans suffered a fate even worse after Pearl Harbor when they were forcibly interned during World War II. The post-WWI Red Scare and emerging Cold War facilitated legislation like the 1940 Alien Registration Act and enabled the government to detain and deport immigrants based on their ethnic origins as well as their radical ideas.
As disturbing as Trump's anti-immigration posture has been his penchant for bullying. His petty name-calling, tacit threats and general bluster, aimed at individual political rivals as well as nations like Mexico and China, recalls the many episodes in which the United States has pushed other countries around. Although Americans have done more than anyone else in the past century to make this a better world — shedding blood to help liberate Europe (twice); protecting South Korea and Kuwait; preventing humanitarian disaster in Kosovo; and contributing immense wealth toward development projects around the globe — Americans have also employed arm-twisting diplomacy, economic sanctions and, at times, brute military force, often in a unilateral fashion.
Latin America, for instance, understands all too well what Trump means when he says "America First," the motto of his foreign policy doctrine. Driven by self-interested realpolitik or exploitative economic interests, the U.S. has threatened, intervened — and even invaded — Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Grenada, Cuba, Panama, Honduras and Nicaragua. When voters in Chile and Guatemala democratically elected leaders deemed unfavorable to America's interests, America had them removed. And it didn't end there: From the Philippines to Vietnam, through Lebanon, Iran, Cambodia, Angola and recently in Iraq, America, although its heart was sometimes in the right place, but often not, has time and again bullied other nations in an imperial manner that led Robert Kagan to aptly title his study of America's foreign relations "Dangerous Nation."
That Trump has prided himself on being "the most militaristic person you will ever meet" shouldn't really come as a surprise, either. When he encouraged supporters to "knock the crap" out of protesters at his rallies, warned that hecklers will be "carried out on a stretcher" and personally admitted, with reference to a demonstrator, "I'd like to punch him in the face," Trump was expressing violent impulses that have long been encoded in the American DNA.
The existential challenges and anxieties engendered early on by the frontier bred, in the words of historian Richard Slotkin, a perpetual "regeneration through violence" that became an integral part of the American experience. The embrace of utilitarian violence can be a virtuous form of self-reliance. But it also justifies, even glorifies, the constant application of force — against nature, against outlaws, against encroaching foreign nations and against Native Americans who were perceived historically as an impediment to America's expansionist notion of "manifest destiny." Violence enforced slavery, Jim Crow and brutal suppression of organized labor's demands for improved wages and conditions in relatively forgotten episodes like the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania, the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia.
Trump's apparent admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions and Benito Mussolini's words, along with his own bellicose rhetoric, are reminders that while the frontier has long since been conquered, its cultural legacy lives on. From the dime novels of the Old West that lionized marauding bandits like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, all the way to our celebration of cinematic gunslingers like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the violence once deemed imperative for physical survival remains embedded in American mythology. Americans' uncompromising, even obstinate, adherence to the Second Amendment, and the fact that America maintains the highest rates both of gun ownership and gun violence in the world, as well as the world's highest incarceration rate, are indices of how deeply ingrained violence is in American society. As comedian George Carlin once observed, from the "war on drugs" to the wars on obesity, crime, poverty and cancer, Americans are obsessed with declaring war on problems instead of solving them.
Lacking the necessary knowledge or experience for the White House, Trump has been able to distract from his boorishness by incessantly peddling conspiracy theories, delusional accusations and dangerous innuendo that are the familiar symptoms of what historian Richard Hofstadter famously diagnosed as the "paranoid style" of American politics a half century ago. Trump's obsession with President Obama's birthplace, his baseless claim that "thousands" of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey when the World Trade Center came down and his phony suggestion that Sen. Ted Cruz's father may have been linked to the JFK assassination may all be nuts, but they are neither more nor less nutty than the endless stream of conspiracy theories that Americans have consistently churned out over the years.
Freemasonry was called "an engine of Satan." Anti-Catholic organizations claimed Jesuits were secret agents working to install the Hapsburg dynasty as emperors of America. Populists warned of an international Jewish banking conspiracy while the Cold War introduced a plethora of anti-communist conspiracies, among them: that the fluoridation of water was a communist plot to rot the brains of Americans, rather than save their teeth. It's not that far a leap from this kind of speculation to Trump's insinuation, after last month's Orlando massacre, that when it comes to terrorism, the president either "doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands."
Knowing that Americans have fallen for this routine before, Trump, much like Sen. Joe McCarthy (to whom he is connected through their mutual relationship with attorney Roy Cohn), has used paranoia for political advantage. But his signature campaign trail refrain, "believe me," meant to reassure audiences of the validity of his claims, should actually sound alarm bells. Like the fictional 'Music Man' who making promises to residents of River City, Trump is an archetypal American huckster: Whether it's his assurances that he'll force Mexico to pay for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the magical deals he'll make to bring back American jobs outsourced overseas or his stated plan to "bomb the hell out of ISIS," Trump is selling voters his modern-day version of snake oil.
America's fiercest critics would have us believe that the bigotry, imperiousness, belligerency, ignorance and paranoia that Trump embodies are the defining features of the American tradition. They are not. To argue, however, that Trump is entirely outside of the American character may be effective messaging for Democrats, but also wishful thinking. His style and message appeal to our worst instincts because they emerged out of them. And while most Trump supporters probably don't share or approve of all Trump's qualities — and are voting for him despite and not because of these qualities — such shortsighted, self-interested calculations might in the long term breed disastrous results. America achieved greatness by reluctantly undergoing a painful process of critical introspection that forced it, time and again, to look in the mirror and come to terms with its worst demons as the prerequisite for exorcising them. To remain true to that process, we should acknowledge that Trump doesn't stand apart from American traditions. He just embodies some of the worst.
Yoav Fromer teaches politics and history at Tel Aviv University. Distributed by the Washington Post.