MAGA's Ever-Shrinking Definition of Who Counts as a 'Real' American
Trump and Vance's attacks on Harris' identity and Walz's public and military service stems from their movement's escalating self-radicalization
Kamala Harris’ entry into the 2024 presidential race has thrown Donald Trump for a loop. For a brief period after Biden stepped aside, Trump seemed to be in a daze: either focusing too much on the person who had just taken himself out of electoral play, or criticizing Harris in less incendiary ways than is typical for him. In the first five days after Biden’s withdrawal announcement—in which Biden exhorted the party to consolidate behind Harris—Trump mentioned Biden and Harris more or less the same number of times on his Truth Social account, the closest thing we have to a live feed of the unadulterated Trumpian id. And when he did mention Harris, it was in reference to immigration and the border, or to tie her to “Bidenomics.” It took Trump a week and a half after Biden had already dropped out to start going, well … full Trump and attacking Harris’ racial identity.
Keeping Out Kamala
The transition from attacking Biden’s policies to Harris’ identity should have been easy for Trump. After all, a major through line of his politics, going all the way back to his avid promotion of the “birther” conspiracy theory alleging that Barack Obama was actually born in another country, has been about who belongs where. Moving from a rival whose characteristics overlap with his own—he and Biden are both are old, white men—to facing a mixed-race, multi-ethnic woman should’ve put Trump in his element. The MAGA movement, after all, is predicated on vilifying identities outside of its racial, ethnic, and cultural ideal. As Eric Taylor Woods and Robert Schertzer put it:
Trump’s support stems from his ability to tap into an “ethno-nationalist” tradition of American identity in his campaign rhetoric. This tradition … is based on a set of criteria (including being white, Christian, native-born, and English-speaking) to define who is a “real” American, and who is not. Trump uses this vision of American identity to garner support from white Americans by campaigning on the idea that he will defend them from the threat posed by people who are not perceived as real Americans—particularly the ostensible threat posed by undocumented migrants.
Given that Trump couldn’t take on Biden’s identity markers since they both shared them, Trump’s tack was to accuse Biden of allowing entry to “hordes” and “caravans” of foreigners with different identity markers who would not just take American jobs and votes but change American culture and country in their image. This was an obvious line of attack against Harris, too, since Biden had tasked her with some border duties, and Trump didn’t waste any time linking her to the border situation. But it was surprising how long it took Trump to really let loose on Harris’ identity. Finally, at the convention for the National Association of Black Journalists at the end of July, Trump insinuated that Harris is a shape-shifter, an ever-migrating other—once Asian, now Black, next Who-Knows-What. His running mate JD Vance—who has bi-racial children of his own—followed up, claiming “phony” Harris “grew up in Canada” and that she is “a fundamentally fake person.” At a Pennsylvania rally last week, Trump offered his patented nativist fear-mongering—falsely claiming that we have no idea where she “came from.” There is nothing subtle here: Harris is multiracial, so not a “real” American.
Moreover, she is a “DEI candidate” who is using her racial identity to make a bid for America’s top job, the kind of advantage that apparently a “real” American like Trump would never seek, never mind that he has made his whiteness his core appeal to voters. She doesn’t belong in the White House as president of the United States but he, a white guy, does.
Harris’ intersectionality presents the Trump/Vance campaign a quiver of identity-based arrows to pierce her qualifications. Vance, who brings to the campaign a finer articulation of Trump’s grabbling misogyny, has previously suggested that women like Harris are ineligible for political power because they’ve failed to fulfill their Woman Job of reproducing and therefore have less of a stake in the future of the country. In other words, childless women aren’t “real” Americans, at least not “real” enough to serve in any position of power.
Trump’s Ever-Shrinking “Real America”
The problem for the GOP is that with these various lines of attack they keep expanding its criteria of who does not count as a “real” American beyond even its crude and crabbed ethnonationalism. Immigrants are inherently unAmerican. But, also, naturalized Americans, children of immigrants, people of color, anyone who has lived abroad, people from the coasts, and childless women can’t be true Americans worthy of holding office—showing that, despite its populist pretensions, Trump’s MAGA movement does not seek to represent a majority.
But Harris’ pick for running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, has led Trump and Vance to add yet another item to its ever-shrinking list of who counts as a true American.
Walz is white, Christian, native-born, English-speaking, and male. All of that meets the ethnonationalist test. So what’s the problem with him?
After throwing a lot of thin spaghetti at the wall, the campaign has apparently decided that what disqualifies him is his choice of vocation: public service. Trump spokesperson Caroline Sunshine dismissed the National Guardsman, football coach, high school teacher, U.S. congressman, and governor as unfit to serve as vice president because, evidently, “He's never held a real job in his life.”
It may surprise workers in military bases, public schools, government agencies, police stations, fire brigades, and courthouses, many of whom see their work as both a career and a calling, to learn that they occupy jobs unworthy of real Americans because their paycheck is drawn from public rather than private coffers. Trump didn’t invent the denigration of public service, but he has helped turn it from a virtue to vice, from contribution to conspiracy. Before Trump, government workers were lazy and inefficient. Under Trump, they became sinister members of the Deep State. The attack on Walz is a blend of both.
Swiftboating Walz
John Kerry was “swiftboated” because he allegedly turned against the military once he left it. Walz put in 24 years in the National Guard, four more than the number needed for retirement. But the Trump campaign is accusing him of “stolen valor” because he exaggerated some elements of his time in uniform. For example, he described himself using a military rank he attained but did not retire with and he claimed he carried weapons “in war” when he was deployed in a non-combat zone in Italy and during the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan. But he is decorated, has a demonstrated willingness to serve in many different parts of the country where he was posted and even overseas. The “stolen valor” narrative overlooks all of this and treats a man who served for nearly two-and-a-half decades as some kind of identity thief.
Trump, whose “personal Vietnam,” as he put it, consisted of avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating, has set the tone for his movement by disparaging the military service of others. For Trump, only some military personnel are honorable; the wounded, the captured, the dead are “losers” and “suckers” (this is a corollary of how Trump views law enforcement officials, as Radley Balko, a contributor for The UnPopulist, just laid out).
The MAGA movement’s harsh dismissal of Walz’s career in public service and his military service flow from the same underlying suspicion of anyone who hasn’t bought into its social vision. When Trump’s National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that Harris “has never had a real job in her life,” and that “neither [Harris nor Walz] have had a real job in the outside world, outside of politics,” the implication is that there is something insufficient, something illegitimate, about the forms of public service that Harris and Walz have participated in and have used as preparation for their bid for the White House. This goes beyond suggesting that a business person has specialized skills that serve him or her well when serving as the country’s executive. It is suggesting that public service is basically disqualifying for the top public service job.
By going down this road, the Trump/Vance campaign exposes the untenability of an ever-narrowing definition of a “real” American. In addition to the groups that Trump and Vance’s personal attacks on Harris have alienated, we can add public workers and certain forms of military service. This may be a bridge too far for many Independent and some Republican voters this year and for those who can see the difference between patriotism and Trump’s nationalism or service and his cynicism.
MAGA Is A Social Vision Predicated On Exclusion
These attacks do more than insult a growing list of voting groups though. They offer a window into the GOP’s proffered fantasy, namely, that if people would just stay in their place—refugees and immigrants in their home countries, women in their homes, people of color in menial jobs while rich, white men hold powerful political positions and set the rules for everyone—“real” Americans would feel that the country was great again. But this is not a vision that has widespread appeal outside the MAGAverse.
While the exuberant Democratic National Convention was going on last week, Trump—who actually incited a coup—upped his rhetoric, describing Harris’ legal, official, smooth, and peaceful Democratic Party nomination as a “vicious, violent overthrow.” Harris, in Trump’s eyes, is not a political candidate who has earned her position as his rival. By virtue not of process but of her many-faceted identity, she is an infiltrator, imposter, thief. Fearful of losing the election, Trump is presenting to his followers a Harris who is an existential threat to the natural and national order.
“Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted,” announced a New York Times headline from February that hasn’t worn well. The response to the Harris/Walz ticket that has Trump so spooked shows that the people were indeed exhausted—but not from resisting Trump. They were exhausted from his constant fear-mongering and threats, his endless efforts to exclude and otherize, and, above all, his ever-growing list of Americans who don’t belong.
However, now that they are being led by two figures who also apparently don’t belong, they suddenly feel that they do—and that’s a perfect cure for exhaustion.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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A lot of good content in this post. Thanks, Anne Lutz Fernandez.
There is one piece of content missing: namely, that it was Sidney Blumenthal, in Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, who first pursed the birther idea about Obama.
Great post, with some familiar themes! I expanded on Swiftboating Walz, MAGA's inability to fathom Democratic veterans, the overlap with toxic masculinity in military culture, and why it proves MAGA doesn't really love the military here: https://open.substack.com/pub/exasperatedalien/p/democrats-cant-be-real-veterans?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ksl93