President Trump ran his highly successful campaign on promises to restore America’s lost greatness. “Make America Great Again” was a brilliant marketing strategy because of its vagueness. There are a lot of conflicting idealized versions of the past that he was able to bring together using it. However, the vagueness of his trademark promise gives him significant leeway to do whatever he wants and claim that it is restoring American greatness.
For me, the main problem comes with the word "again," a crucial part of Mr. Trump’s slogan. He is trying, apparently, not so much to bring "progress" to America as to restore a past America that is happier, more respected and more secure than we are today. The problem is that this America arguably never existed and certainly never did without significant drawbacks, like land grabbing from Native Americans, institutionalized racism and the threat of eminent nuclear holocaust.
I’m not trying to bash America’s past. There’s much to be proud of in our nation’s history. But the way Trump is conducting his first days in office seems to be bringing back not the glory days but the shameful episodes in America’s history — the things which America was great in spite of, not because of. I’ll provide a few examples below.
Trump’s now-challenged ban on travel and immigration from Muslim-majority countries echoed U.S. immigration restrictions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Congress passed laws banning Chinese and Japanese immigrants and restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, whose inhabitants were held to be racially inferior. Trump’s ban was ostensibly for security reasons and stems from the twisted logic that, since most terror attacks are committed by Muslims, we ought to keep them out of the country. This ignores the fact, documented by the Cato Institute, that from “1975-2015, the United States admitted approximately 700,000 asylum-seekers and 3.25 million refugees,” of which only “four asylum-seekers and 20 refugees later became terrorists and launched attacks on US soil.” So the odds of newly arrived refugees turning terrorist, especially given the stringent process of background checks, is incredibly low.
And while the ban would have done nothing to bolster national security, it may have had or still might have the unintended consequence of making the U.S.’ substantial Muslim population a more fertile recruiting ground for extremists as government policy and public perception alienates and demonizes Muslims.
Trump’s comments about torture made during the campaign and his consideration of reopening CIA black sites used to torture terrorist suspects demonstrates that he believes it necessary to use extreme measures to defeat the extremists of the IS.. and other radical jihadist groups. Unfortunately, it is not an original thought. In our struggle against the savagery of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II, the U.S. conducted bombing raids on non-military targets, leveling historic cities like Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. We won the war and defeated unspeakable evils but at a steep cost. Let us not once again forsake moral superiority to achieve victory, for if the butchers of the I.S. succeed, even in defeat, in dragging the U.S. down to their level, they will be the real winners.
Trump’s comments suggesting that NATO, the organization the U.S. pioneered to put a check on Russia, is obsolete, and that long-time U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea should have to pay more for U.S. protection are reminiscent of the America First movement prior to World War II, which advocated for isolationism in the face of Germany’s and Japan’s aggression on the grounds that it wasn’t our land being taken and our populace slaughtered. While things aren’t quite as bad now as in the 1930s, his comments suggest a cynical abdication of America's commitment to justice and human rights in favor of national self-interest.
In all the cases above, both past and present, the U.S. let self-interest trump (pardon the pun) American principles with tragic results. So if Trump really wants to make America great again, he’ll recognize that America is greatest when it’s putting its lofty principles of equality, liberty and justice into practice at home and promoting them abroad, not turning inward in self-interest.