President Trump welcomed the British monarch King Charles III to the White House yesterday and gave a speech that, on its surface, expressed warmth between the two countries. But its true purpose was darker. Trump’s speech stamped his imprimatur on an ascendant view of American history and politics—one that is controversial even on the American right, and that walks up to the edge of white nationalism.
The analysis Trump endorsed is that America is defined not by its founding values but by its Anglo-Saxon cultural and genetic heritage. This idea has radical consequences, some of which have already manifested under the administration.
Trump’s sentiment was unmistakable. “Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed,” he said, proceeding to depict the Founders not as rebels against the English crown but instead its loyal heirs: “Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.”
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Trump proceeded to downplay the Revolution, employing a telltale phrase: “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776.”
That line, asserting that America is not merely an idea, has become a cliché among a faction on the right known as the national conservatives. When the natcons say this, as they do all the time, they are not merely making the obvious point that the United States is composed of a landmass and a population. They are advancing a series of associated ideas. They believe that America is the product of white, European settlers (a conviction they share, ironically, with left-wing critics); that Americanness is a genetic inheritance and therefore an identity immigrants cannot obtain (an idea conveyed by Trump’s reference to Anglo-Saxon veins); and that, most controversially, the values articulated by the founding documents are less important than the natural rights of what the natcons call “heritage Americans” to rule the land in perpetuity.
Until recently, most Republicans would have considered this account of American history bizarre. Ronald Reagan once said, “America is less of a place than an idea, and if it is an idea, and I believe that to be true, it is an idea that has been deep in the souls of man.” When Republicans touted “American exceptionalism” during the presidency of George W. Bush, they meant that they did not consider the U.S. to be a nation like every other, but a special country by dint of its founding upon the basis of universal values rather than an identity shared by a small group of people.
It is not just that the natcons care about having a common language, culture, food, and so on. They also believe, with different levels of conviction or explicitness, that white people are better than nonwhite people. They consider immigrants from the developing world a pollutant. They don’t merely want to enforce immigration laws strictly. They see immigration, legal and illegal alike, as a cultural threat to America.
In the 19th century, it was controversial to accept that immigrants from places such as Ireland could become Americans, and even more outrageous to extend this to Chinese immigrants. Over time, the American understanding of who could assimilate into American culture has expanded. The natcons wish to roll back a century or so of social evolution.
As a corollary to their conviction that America is defined by its ethnic heritage rather than its founding ideals, the natcons have a certain skepticism toward those ideals themselves. Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt said at the National Conservatism Conference last year: “For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told 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.”
The natcons are one faction within the Republican Party. Trump gave that faction a boost by selecting J. D. Vance, an enthusiastic natcon, as his vice president for his second term. Vance’s 2024 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention included a brief embrace of the natcons. “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
Trump’s White House remarks yesterday aligned him even more explicitly with that faction. Stephen Miller, another natcon, excitedly reposted its key passages on X. Leading self-identified national conservatives such as the podcaster Michael Knowles and the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts have expressed similar excitement.
Does Trump himself fully apprehend the meaning conveyed by his words? That is hard to say. The president is not known for his grasp of the finer points of right-wing doctrine, and his leaden recitation of the words conveyed absolutely no passion for the subject matter. He does, however, side with the natcons at an instinctive level. He has questioned why the U.S. accepts immigrants from what he calls “shithole countries” rather than places like Sweden. He has repeatedly described the children of immigrants as foreigners, demanding they go back to “their” countries. He has charged that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native Americans, attributing this to “bad genes.”
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The national conservative faction, like the Know-Nothing party of the 19th century and the America First movement of the 1940s, considers itself a heroic vanguard dedicated to rescuing American civilization from the Third World immigrant hordes who have transformed it beyond recognition.
They do not directly assert a right to ignore the Constitution or the law. Instead, they do so indirectly, positioning themselves as the sole claimants to American political legitimacy. Their American-ness does not rest on appealing to the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or any other universal document. Their heritage was passed down to them through their blood.
Trump’s iron-fisted methods—which in just the past day have included pressuring a TV network to fire a comedian for making fun of the president, and charging someone he dislikes with manufactured crimes—violate traditional American values. The natcons would surely scream about the Constitution if a Democrat ever took such steps against them. They do not appear to believe that those values restrain their own side, because, as the representatives of the true American heritage, they are entitled to prevail.
The natcons have enjoyed almost untrammeled influence over the course of Trump’s second term, which has combined challenges to birthright citizenship and aggressive immigration enforcement with a campaign to entrench power and intimidate political opponents. In his speech yesterday, Trump made his affinity with their project more overt than ever.
