“Saying the quiet part loud,” as the saying goes, is such a prominent feature of the second Trump administration’s communications strategy that the phrase scarcely has meaning these days. What could the “quiet part” possibly be when the President of the United States is posting AI slop that depicts him as a fighter pilot dropping tons of fecal matter on No Kings protestors? Or when he posts even more putrid AI slop that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes?
Well, it turns out that the second video tells us something about the last remaining vestiges of the quiet part. It was a little too explicitly racist for even some prominent members of the MAGA coalition, and so Trump eventually took it down. This is the last taboo that the Trump administration needs to mind: you can summarily executive civilians, ship immigrants off to concentration camps, and openly state your intention to rule as a dictator; but you can’t actually say that there is a natural racial hierarchy with white people at the top, much less that your goal is to assert white dominance over the United States and the world. Leave that to people like Nick Fuentes, who sit at just enough of a remove to give you a veneer of plausible deniability
Trump is becoming increasingly disinhibited with age, but those regime officials with greater possession of their faculties have learned how to say “America belongs to white people” through insinuation rather than blunt assertion. Instead, they say, as Senator Eric Schmitt did at the 2025 National Conservative Conference, that the United States belongs to “a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.” Or, as J.D. Vance put it in a speech to the neo-fascist Claremont Institute, “a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” Most recently, Marco Rubio—perhaps the one member of the administration who is an even more overtly cynical and chameleonic social climber than Vance—has argued that real Americans share with Europeans “the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
One of the ways you can tell this is all code is by the combination of prolixity and imprecision that tends to accompany these paeans to the American race. Listening to them, you might sometimes find yourself paraphrasing Liz Lemon and blurting out, “J.D., just say Aryan, this is taking forever.” And indeed, when less adroit Nazis like Elon Musk try to circle around a clearer articulation of what they mean by American heritage, they end up making hilariously ahistorical claims about, for example, the “English-Scotts-Irish origin” of American culture. (“Scotch-Irish” is, in the words of one historian, “an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland and rarely used by British historians.”)
The fact is, there’s very little basis for any of this stuff, at least if you’re looking for historical roots deeper than the middle of the nineteenth century. “Scotch-Irish” as a self-descriptor appears to have only entered common usage after large-scale Irish immigration to the United States began in the 1840s; incumbent Presbyterian communities sought a way to distinguish themselves from the largely poor, Catholic newcomers. (Ironically, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Eric Schmitt are all Catholic; Elon Musk is “culturally Christian,” whatever that means.)
The “Western Civilization” that, according to Rubio, binds America to Europe, is of a similarly recent vintage. As Yuri Slezkine observed in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, there were no self-identified “Westerners” until the nineteenth century—and most of the early theorists of Western Civilization made a point of excluding Russia from their definition, which would no doubt upset many of Vladimir Putin’s fans on the American far right. Even the concept of a single, coherent nation that commands one’s personal allegiance is an invention of the 1800s; one that was more commonly associated with liberalism than aristocratic conservatism in its early iterations.
American fascists like Vance now openly admire nationalist movements in places like France and Italy for their attempts to preserve a single imagined lineage; but neither Italy nor France were unified cultural-linguistic communities two centuries ago. As Richard Evans writes in The Pursuit of Power, his magisterial history of Europe between the Napoleonic Era and World War I, Sicilians still tended to speak a dialectic of Ancient Greek at the time of Italian unification. National identities such as “French” and “Italian” were things that had to be invented, and they were often imposed through military or state power. As recently as 1864, Evans writes, a state inspector reported stumping a group of school-aged children in southeastern France by asking them what country they lived in.
Americanism is a similarly new and synthetic identity. It is commonly observed that up to the Civil War, residents of the United States tended to speak of “the United States” in the plural instead of the singular; their primary affective attachments were to their states of residence, not the country as a whole. This only changed with the Civil War, which is rightly described by some historians as the second American revolution. To a considerable degree, we have Abraham Lincoln to thank for our modern conception of the United States as a single nation.
This being the case, maybe we should defer to Lincoln when it comes to the meaning of American nationhood instead of spelunking in the murky past of the Celtic and Icenic tribes. Lincoln was pretty explicit on this front: in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address, he defines the United States as “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He dates the creation of this “new nation” back to 1776 — the birthdate not of the United States Constitution, but of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in other words, rejects the notion that American nationhood is rooted in genetic ancestry. It is instead rooted in a shared creed based on a particular conception of liberty and political equality.
Even during Lincoln’s time there were, of course, alternative conceptions of what it meant to be an American. Lincoln would have been familiar with the thought of John C. Calhoun, one of the more influential and sophisticated proponents of a quintessentially American white supremacist political philosophy. But the Union, led by Lincoln, defeated the Calhounist Confederacy. Calhounism was decidedly not the intellectual origin of what many historians now call the Second Founding. It was instead Lincolnism that became the ideological foundation for American reunification.
In his NatCon speech, Schmitt sneered at the idea that “the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.” In their own meditations on the meaning of America, Musk, Rubio and Vance don’t deign to mention the Declaration at all. They’re more interested in resurrecting Calhounism and marrying it to modern fascist thought.
But we should be clear: when they engage in this project, they are the ones who are rejecting our heritage as Americans. It is the modern-day Calhounists who are repelled by everything that truly makes American identity distinctive: its pluralism, its privileging of a shared creed over a shared gene pool, its history of hard-fought struggles for recognition, freedom, and equality. They might call themselves “heritage Americans” based on their bloodlines and supposed connection to the soil, but they reject the aspects of American identity that really count. The racially purified despotism of their dreams would not represent a return to this country’s traditions, but a usurpation of them.