I spend more time arguing with proud nativists in bars around DC than I would like. You might be surprised how blatantly some spout their horror of the US’s ethnic diversity. But these conversations are an indication of the toxic cauldron that is bubbling away inside the Trump administration.
It’s not long before well-read Maga-ites – and I encounter more literate people on the right than the left – ask whether I’ve read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed (1989), which traces American culture back to the English counties from which the first colonists came. The implication is that the US must restore its old ethnic make-up in order to be truly American again. They see the United States as defined by its Anglo-European ancestry and therefore a non-European United States is no longer America. Donald Trump seems to agree: a thread running through the past eight months is the attempt to restore that European heritage.
America’s leaders have always grappled with how to distinguish the US from the many countries this nation of immigrants is made from. Language has long been the subject over which this battle is fought.
A problem for the US’s Founding Fathers was fashioning a distinct national identity apart from Britain, even though they shared a common language with the mother country. The Marquis de Chastellux reported in 1780 that some Bostonians wanted to make Hebrew the official language. In 1795, the House narrowly voted down a proposal that all its proceedings be printed in German as well as English. Congress had to satisfy itself by renaming English as the “language of the United States”. The great lexicographer Noah Webster wrote in 1789 that as an “independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard.”
So much for Webster in Trump’s America. The idea that the US is exclusively defined by its English or sometimes European heritage – and therefore not other cultures – has been building for some time on the American right. This nativism increasingly means conceiving of the US as an Anglo-Saxon creation with a single language. By 1988, 17 states had voted to make English the official tongue in response to the wave of Asian and Hispanic immigration that ramped up after 1965. But it is Trump who has gone the furthest.
In March, he symbolically declared English the official language of the US. His executive order said this was necessary to secure a “unified and cohesive society”. Trump has re-proclaimed Leif Erikson Day – to memorialise the Viking said to be the first European to set foot on continental North America – and has commemorated Christopher Columbus Day without doing the same for Indigenous People’s Day. Imagine how different this would be if Kamala Harris had won the presidency. (In 2021, she said Columbus’s expedition to America “ushered in” part of the US’s “shameful past”.)
What might seem like a redundant fight over a nation’s symbols is backed up by real policy. The New York Times has reported that the administration wants to prioritise refugees from European countries, particularly those suppressed for supporting populism and opposing immigration. At the same time, the administration sees “immigrants’ rights” as an oxymoron.
There are now calls for naturalised American citizens to be denied the same rights as the native born. The Maga congresswoman Nancy Mace has suggested that Ilhan Omar, a fellow member of Congress, be deported back to Somalia, where she was born. Laura Loomer, an online activist the president listens to, has called for Muslims to be banned from standing in Congress. “Why do we even have Muslims in Congress?” she tweeted. “What a stain on our country.”
Or consider the right’s reaction to the announcement that Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper whose lyrics are mostly in Spanish, will headline the Super Bowl’s half-time show at the start of next year. Remember that Puerto Rico is part of the US. Trump called the decision “ridiculous” and Maga influencer Benny Johnson complained there would be “no songs in English”. A counter-programme called the All-American Halftime Show is being put on instead. On its website, attendees are asked what music they would like to hear. One of the options is “anything in English”.
The progressive congressman Ro Khanna said to me earlier this year that Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, want to turn America into “another ordinary nation”. In other words, they want to get rid of the idea that anyone who believes in US ideals can become American in favour of a country for those who can prove that their American lineage goes back generations. I suspect Vance would have little to disagree with in Khanna’s characterisation. As Vance put it in July, those who fought in the Civil War have a “have a hell of a lot more claim over America” than progressive liberals.
The question is, how far is the administration willing to go to make its vision for America a reality? It calls to mind Fritz Stern’s line on conservative revolutionaries wanting to “destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealised past in an imaginary future”.
[Further reading: Give Donald Trump the credit]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop