Donald Trump’s Disturbing Welcome for King Charles

President Trump welcomed the British monarch King Charles III to the White House yesterday and gave a speech that, on its surface, expressed warmth between the two countries. But its true purpose was darker. Trump’s speech stamped his imprimatur on an ascendant view of American history and politics—one that is controversial even on the American right, and that walks up to the edge of white nationalism.

The analysis Trump endorsed is that America is defined not by its founding values but by its Anglo-Saxon cultural and genetic heritage. This idea has radical consequences, some of which have already manifested under the administration.

Trump’s sentiment was unmistakable. “Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed,” he said, proceeding to depict the Founders not as rebels against the English crown but instead its loyal heirs: “Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.”

Trump proceeded to downplay the Revolution, employing a telltale phrase: “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776.”

That line, asserting that America is not merely an idea, has become a cliché among a faction on the right known as the national conservatives. When the natcons say this, as they do all the time, they are not merely making the obvious point that the United States is composed of a landmass and a population. They are advancing a series of associated ideas. They believe that America is the product of white, European settlers (a conviction they share, ironically, with left-wing critics); that Americanness is a genetic inheritance and therefore an identity immigrants cannot obtain (an idea conveyed by Trump’s reference to Anglo-Saxon veins); and that, most controversially, the values articulated by the founding documents are less important than the natural rights of what the natcons call “heritage Americans” to rule the land in perpetuity.

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