On Jan. 20 in Washington, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th US president. In his inaugural address, Trump appealed to patriotism in an attempt to eliminate the racial, gender, religious and social divisions that have been growing in the process of building a diverse society.
Trump said that he hoped Americans would be like US soldiers and remember that “whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots” and “we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag.” Soon after Trump’s address, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Trump would proclaim a “national day of patriotism” that would become a public holiday for federal government employees.
However, Trump’s patriotism call is incompatible with the US public’s calls for action in the construction of a more diverse society. To civil rights activists, human rights are human rights. There should not be an option of “making concessions for the sake of national interests” when addressing gender, racial or religious discrimination, or discrimination against certain social values.
This has left civil rights activists questioning whether Trump is simply using patriotism to legitimize his continued reliance on white supremacy in his understanding of US society and discrimination against minorities.
Such doubts are not without factual basis. In the past, Trump has made various flagrantly discriminatory remarks. One of the best known examples of this was when he in 2011 publicly questioned whether then-US president Barack Obama, who is black and was seeking re-election at the time, was really born in the US.
Another example is how he, in the final presidential debate in October last year, used the term “nasty woman” to refer to his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That expression was later used by US feminists as a slogan of solidarity when they called on the US public to oppose Trump, resist gender discrimination and defend the rights of minorities. Women’s rights advocates even organized women’s marches in major US cities and around the world to protest against Trump on the day after his inauguration.
According to data provided by two US academics, the total number of protesters in cities across the US on Jan. 21, the day of the march, was between 3.3 million and 4.2 million, which is the largest protest in US history.
During the next four years, similar social struggles are likely to continue occurring in the US.
However, Trump will probably continue to follow his path of patriotism. After all, without the goal of “making America great again,” Trump would be too insignificant and weak to be able to respond to the wide range of objections from the diverse US society.
What Trump does not understand is that for many Americans, it is the public protests against him in defense of the multidimensional values of freedom and democracy that really makes the US great.
Jason Kuo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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