Trump Is the Enemy of the American Revolution

[Celerity]

He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it’s our responsibility to uphold the Founders’ legacy.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198379/trump-enemy-american-revolution

https://archive.ph/f3oQG



Almost 250 years ago, on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed the United States an independent country. Having rid themselves of a king, the revolutionaries established a republican government that derived its authority from the consent of the governed. Today, as we approach the Declaration of Independence’s semiquincentennial, Donald Trump and his allies claim the Revolution for themselves. They have made fealty to the American Revolution part of their culture war against “woke” progressivism. The Revolution has become a pawn in Trump’s politics of retribution against the country’s supposed cultural enemies.

Trump and his allies claim to be patriots while regularly violating the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and undermining the government established by our Constitution. Trump’s actions since his reelection have all but destroyed the republic the founding generation fought to establish two and a half centuries ago. Those of us who still believe in the ideals of the Revolution need to reclaim it from Trumpian pretenders. We need to remember not just the revolutionary generation’s principles but also the courage they exhibited when they stood up to tyranny. Today, allegiance to the Revolution requires being willing to do what is necessary to stop Trump’s authoritarian coup and to restore constitutional governance.

According to Trump, the American Revolution is fragile. Beleaguered by its enemies, a revolution in the name of popular self-government now needs a strongman to protect it from “a concerted and widespread effort” by progressive historians “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” in the words of Trump’s March 27, 2025, executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Trump says—with no apparent sense of irony, given his earlier statement, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president”—that the American Revolution stands for “liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”

Trump’s executive orders on history reflect the ideas expressed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, according to which the United States is “divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” To the radicals at Heritage, we are in a civil war that, according to the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, requires “real Americans to take back our country,” even, it seems, if that means violating the very ideals that they supposedly support. For Trump, Roberts, and their allies, the actual principles of the Revolution matter less than its capacity to signify tribal loyalty by distinguishing “real Americans” from domestic enemies.

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