Historian details how Trump has killed American patriotism to satisfy his own ego

Trump Hijacked the 250th, and the Press Is Still Calling It “Patriotism”A celebration turned personal propertyThe source story is simple: what should have been a national milestone has been bent into Donald Trump’s ego project, and two anti-Trump conservatives are trying to explain why a lot of Americans now feel less proud of the country. That is the surface. The deeper story is power: Trump controls the symbolic machinery, and he uses it to fuse loyalty to the nation with loyalty to himself.Who actually did thisTrump did not merely “complicate” patriotism. He weaponized it. The source makes clear that the second election of a man who tried to overturn an election after his first defeat did psychological damage to people who still expected the system to reject that kind of politics. Instead, it rewarded it. That is not confusion. That is institutional failure with a name attached to it.The blame gets launderedThe article’s language drifts toward abstraction, but the responsibility is not abstract. The problem is not that Americans are emotionally fragile or that some vague civic consensus has frayed on its own. Fox News, talk radio, Trump’s political machine, and the party structure that keeps enabling him have helped build a political environment “not operating in the real world,” as Richardson put it. That is not a cultural accident. It is a propaganda ecosystem producing political disorientation on purpose.Polls as symptoms, not causesThe Fox News and Gallup numbers are useful here, but only as evidence of the damage. If 27 percent of Democrats say they are proud of the country and national pride has hit a record low, that does not prove Americans have become less decent. It shows that Trumpism has made patriotic language feel contaminated. When a movement turns national identity into a vehicle for grievance, cruelty, and self-worship, the people who still believe in democratic government are not the ones losing faith for no reason. They are reacting to what has been done to the country.The real issue is agencyRichardson’s point about people learning they can do something matters more than the usual nostalgia for unity. The far right fears agency because democracy depends on it. Trumpism works by shrinking people’s sense of what is possible, then selling submission as realism. That is why the language of helplessness is so politically useful to the people in power. If citizens believe they can only watch, then power stays where it is.The larger patternThis is the recurrent pattern: authoritarian politics colonizes democratic symbols, then blames the public for feeling alienated by them. Trump takes the language of America, empties it of civic responsibility, and refills it with personal loyalty. The result is not a wounded patriotism that needs gentle repair. It is a political culture that has been deliberately poisoned by a movement that treats the country as a stage set for one man’s grievance and one party’s cowardice. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe