AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM….. a term nested in the narrations of literary luminaries like Thomas Paine 1776 and Alexis Tocqueville 1831 …notably after the nation’s declaration of Independence.
It was a branding steeped in self affirmation, expounded reportedly, by Woodrow Wilson, the first President to embrace its representation.
We can say that the use of the brand continued under succeeding Presidents, who, by then, had an established canon of conduct -albeit in an era when media was decidedly archaic and conforming – which may have allowed anomalies to fade into oblivion.
But Trump was heralded into this elite club with a self-confessed resume of engaging in a forced kissing frenzy and a grabbing of women’s genitalia …a departure from the prescribed character propriety, which appealed more to anger than reason amongst those who thought not being vulgar was just too elite.
He became a hit in white male communities, rife with under education and underemployment, which made racial grievance easier to absorb and presented white machismo as an enduring birth rite. Norms became the cause of their social inequity so he sliced cussing into his vernacular and demeaning into his dialog, making coarseness his calling card and the called his coequal.
This is where catch phrases like enemy of the people, hoax and witch hunt languished as an escape hatch from prescribed order. It was a new form of empowerment, this MAGA contagion of white grievance, as a political platform.
But like every populous movement, some MAGATS are more equal than some.
There is an educated battalion of the MAGA movement equipped to operate more as tacticians, strategists and mobilizers than rabble-rousers.
Every animal has its role.
That they formed armies to support this new order was hardly by error because this deviant person, elevated to the tower of his nation’s governance, normalized simple mindedness and made every ignoramus a foot soldier in his army of anti- establishment.
His rallies and pep talks, in between, are social orgies of unrestraint, where promoting white purity is the catechism of his politics, with a skillful intertwining of the drain on ‘their‘ society that every ‘other’ is imposing upon them.
Suggesting seepage into the Congress is debatable because dormant diseases awaken in the right environment.
This predominantly white body, especially in the Senate where occupants are often relics of Pre- Civil Rights, now suffer from a weakened immunity to the social consensus of democracy, one of the pillars of post Civil Rights exceptionalism.
So, ninety year old grand wizards, on Senate Arms Committees, may find rape and a lack of military acumen, at administrative and operations levels, qualifying for a Secretary of Defense.
And this extends to Party members who may be elevated to group captains irrespective of criminal record, to Heads of National Security, in spite of a Congressional Complaint record of socializing with or being paid by the country’s enemies.
Trump’s return to the nation’s pinnacle comes with bolder and brasher attacks on American Exceptionalism borne by his character that has a flaw for every ill. By just holding the office, this personality character eclipses the collective decency of preceding Presidents, even if marked on a curve. He totes his own tarnish in such volume that it renders exceptionalism bad.
His establishment of a department intimating some oversight of efficiency, run by an entrepreneur of racist Afrikaan Boer descent, is the hallmark of disrespect for a system of government that predates him by centuries.
That Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is unconstitutional, is only one of the several manifestations of Trump’s imperial adventurism, that a Constitution constructed on honor was ill prepared to contain.
And the diminishment of the sanctity of the Oval Office, demonstrated by the travesty of the White House briefing that profiled the unelected Musk, wearing his interrupting toddler on his head after ostensibly positioning the child’s weighty gold chain for the camera, was but one degradation.
Fielding questions and answers expected of the elected Trump, was nothing short of a stake in the heart of the Exceptionalism that brought many of us here, searching for what our Constitution’s promised in democracy but failed to deliver because of the Trumps that came and went.
The slothfulness of the elected Opposition’s response to this civil take over of the seat of government by Musk, who shutters every department that has ever questioned his operational integrity, remains frightening. It is alleviated only by the civil involvement of pickets and disruption by citizens who are now awakening to the danger of this Trump Administration, which has made disrespect for law and constitution his American Exceptionalism.
And if the disrespectful show of patronizing and condescension in the admonitions (‘speeches’) given at the Munich Security Conference by the two most unqualified members of government to every hold their positions- Hegseth and Vance -is to be taken for what they were, then there is more reason to be fearful of Trump’s stab at re-branding American Exceptionalism.
American Exceptionalism could mean Europe alone which would mean an attack against America is an attack on America alone. Article 5 be damned, which is Trump’s implied sentiment, with the full swagger of a Venture Dictator, armed only with an enemy caught, momentarily, off guard.
But he has no plan for when that enemy regains his posture and retaliates by walking away, leaving him with his manufactured aggression and formidable war chest.
The assertion by the confirmation granted by the Republican Senate is that Secretary Hegseth is an experienced and capable defense operative.
The sheer lack of necessary training, operational and administrative experience will impede Hegseth from giving Trump the blunt fact that America will be more formidable as part of an alliance – but will be strained, to acute vulnerability, if drawn in to sustained defense posture, on multiple fronts, by several opponents at once.
It’s a security alert that Trump keeps fetching Putin’s message of making the G7, G8 again.
That he’s canvassing, with fan boy exuberance, for his return is troubling, on at least two fronts.
It’s either he doesn’t care that Putin was expelled for land grabbing Crimea and has since invaded the entire country of Ukraine, or he isn’t aware.
That may explain his obsession with Canada, Greenland and the Gulf of Mexico, renamed by his donors to humor his ambitions, as it casts shade on the ‘Exceptionalism’ that was once America’s brand.