The Brooklyn Rail

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” warned James Madison in The Federalist Papers: No. 10, in 1787, arguing for the ratification of the US Constitution.

America was not founded 250 years ago on a shared ethnicity, territory, or religion, but on an idea, written into our founding documents. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” reads the Declaration of Independence. George Orwell said patriotism is an allegiance to an idea. But people have to believe in the idea.

When JD Vance accepted his nomination for vice president at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024, he set himself up against America as an idea, explicitly: “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. … Now that’s not just an idea, my friends … that is a homeland.” And Vance returned to this theme in a speech accepting a “Statesmanship Award” in July 2025 at the Claremont Institute in California: “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” Vance also used the occasion in California to attack Zohran Mamdani, who had just won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. He referred to Mamdani as “a 33-year old Communist,” and quoted the mayoral candidate as saying this, on Independence Day in 2025: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” To which Vance replied, “There is no gratitude here. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.” And you can hear the venom in Vance’s voice when he asks, “Who the hell do these people think they are?”

By “these people,” Vance means anyone who is not a White Christian. Who do these people think they are? They think they are Americans, and nothing JD Vance does or says is going to change that. He fancies himself a writer, but he twists words to conceal his intent. In fact, Vance’s question is patently racist and xenophobic, and it signals a major departure from the core principles this country was built on, and for which many have fought and died. Ultimately, the People will decide which America they want, going forward.

Part of the current battle among the American people is between belief and cynicism. Many Trump voters have completely lost faith in the American form of government. This part of the public has become so cynical about democracy that they believe Trump actually represents them. They think the whole voting thing is rigged, and that sets them up for tyranny and the end of democracy. Trump no longer even tries to conceal his intent.

After everything that Trump has done, Republicans probably cannot win a free and fair national election in the US. So Trump, through Bill Pulte as his acting Director of National Intelligence and others, wants to nationalize the elections and suppress the vote by eliminating mail-in ballots (using the Post Office to do his bidding) and creating a national voter file that Trump can use to decide who gets to vote in America. He’s convinced some of his followers that these Machiavellian measures are necessary because there is rampant voter fraud, with lots of non-citizens voting for Democrats. Even the Heritage Foundation has investigated and concluded that there is no such voter fraud, but the lie persists, and cynicism induces a kind of projective gullibility.

Trump is obsessed with his own image and is trying to replicate it everywhere he can, tagging everything in sight. Similarly, he is studding the government with incompetent people whose only purpose is to do whatever he tells them to do. And thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court, the president can now fire and replace anyone in the Civil Service just because he wants to replace them with someone more subservient to him. After this ruling last week, Trump triumphantly (and correctly) crowed, “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.” With all three branches of government in his pocket, there are few chances left to check that power now.

Tocqueville said one of the most remarkable things about America is its capacity to repair itself. The populace, the voters, make mistakes, yes, but then they repair it. Trump is testing this theory more than anyone ever has in American history.

You can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to keep the grift going for quite some time.

It just came out that Trump and his family have pocketed $2.2 billion since Trump was elected the second time. $1.4 billion of this came from the family’s crypto schemes. When the New York Times asked the president about this obvious corruption, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared.”

The crypto scheme carries an important lesson. The $1.4 billion that the Trumps gained from crypto didn’t come out of thin air. It came from a million hapless investors who lost money because they were not in on the scheme. The windfall for the Trumps was not wealth creation, but “wealth transfer,” aka grift.

Contrary to everything he promised in the campaign, Trump has spent the first year and half of his second term doing nothing to lower the cost of living for the vast majority of Americans, and instead raking in billions for himself, his family, and his oligarch friends.

On this 250th birthday of the founding of the American idea, we recognize that we are going to have to be part of the refounding of America. That’s who These People think they are.