\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n
When a person is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, they receive not just a new citizenship but also typically a few other objects: an American flag, a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and a greeting from the president. Of these, the last is the most ephemeral\u2014just a form letter\u2014but it can reveal a great deal about how the writer thinks about the country he leads.<\/p>\n
This week, the White House released Donald Trump\u2019s new version of the letter. (In both terms, it took Trump months to get around to replacing his predecessor\u2019s missive.) Although the Trump administration has both cracked down on illegal immigration and sought to curtail legal immigration, the letter is warm and welcoming. Where the letter diverges from those of most past presidents is in its vision of the United States, which Trump sees as founded not on ideas or ideals but on culture and tradition.<\/p>\n
For Trump, the nation is less a melting pot where different cultures combine harmoniously than a crucible where foreign notions are burned off and a homogeneous mix emerges.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica has always welcomed those who embrace our values, assimilate into our society, and pledge allegiance to our country,\u201d he writes. \u201cBy taking this oath, you have forged a sacred bond with our Nation, her traditions, her history, her culture, and her values.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many philosophers have historically argued that citizenship bestows freedoms but also confers obligations upon those who hold it. Yet Trump\u2019s reframing is more than a nod to those duties. It\u2019s also a move away from a focus on the intellectual underpinnings of the American project, which was an essential message for past presidents, regardless of party.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn making this journey to America, you have done more than move to a new place. You have become part of an idea,\u201d Joe Biden wrote. Bill Clinton expressed something similar in different terms, writing, \u201cYou now share in a great experiment: a nation dedicated to the ideal that all of us are created equal, a nation with profound respect for individual rights.\u201d George W. Bush wrote that \u201cAmericans are united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals.\u201d (I am relying in some cases here on copies of the letters posted online by recipients.)<\/p>\n
Some presidents have also discussed the importance of democratic engagement. \u201cI ask you to pray for the strength and soul of our nation, and I encourage you to actively participate in shaping its future,\u201d wrote George H. W. Bush. \u201cI encourage you to be involved in your community and to promote the values that guide us as Americans,\u201d Barack Obama implored. Trump, who has demonstrated his skepticism of protest and basic democracy, makes no such suggestions.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s new letter is also different from the one he sent in his first term, and not only because it is shorter and his signature is an even more Twombly-esque abstraction. Unity has never held much interest for him, but where his first letter had a mention of \u201cmutual kinship and affection,\u201d the new one puts no emphasis on collective bonding. And where Trump used the word nation only once in his first term, he mentions it four times now, capitalized each time. (Neither letter uses the word immigrant, as Obama\u2019s did, much less calls the United States a \u201cnation of immigrants,\u201d as Biden\u2019s did.)<\/p>\n
The conceptual shift to nation\u2014a term often connected, outside of the United States, to an ethnic polity\u2014is part of a broader rhetorical change on the right. Vice President J. D. Vance made it most forcefully in his nomination-acceptance speech last summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s ongoing attack on free speech and the rule of law make Vance\u2019s acknowledgment\u2014and Trump\u2019s, in the letter\u2014of the principles at the heart of the Constitution ring hollow. Even taken at face value, however, this emphasis on Americans\u2019 common culture is in tension with the idea that all people are created equal, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote after Vance\u2019s speech: \u201cIf America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American. But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is particularly important right now, because the Trump administration is attempting to redefine what that shared history is\u2014for example, by restoring a portrait of the traitor Robert E. Lee at West Point, attempting to install commissars at the Smithsonian, and ordering the bowdlerization of references at national parks to darker parts of the past, including the famous and searing image of a freed slave\u2019s scars from whippings. These steps seem designed to exclude some kinds of people from the shared history, or else force them to acquiesce to a tendentious or partial version.<\/p>\n
Trump, as is his nature, depicts citizenship as a kind of deal. \u201cYou have pledged your heart to America\u2014and in return, she offers the boundless promise of freedom and opportunity,\u201d he writes. Prospective citizens might reasonably wonder whether his government will hold up its end of that bargain.<\/p>\n
Related:<\/p>\n
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n Dispatches<\/strong><\/p>\n Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n Illustration by Akshita Chandra \/ The Atlantic<\/p>\n How to Think, Not What to Think<\/p>\n By Sian Leah Beilock<\/p>\n Across the country, people are questioning the value and role of higher education, and institutions\u2014particularly the elite ones\u2014are experiencing a crisis in public trust. On top of that, tech titans are convinced that AI will break higher education, while many observers lament its corrupting influence and ask whether the \u201cmind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university,\u201d as one historian of education put it recently, are gone forever \u2026<\/p>\n Despite the reforms that our institutions of higher education must embark on to ensure that we are teaching our students how to think\u2014and not what to think\u2014a four-year residential-college experience remains one of the most powerful human environments for cultivating human qualities.<\/p>\n Read the full article.<\/p>\n More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n Culture Break<\/p>\n Warner Bros. Pictures<\/p>\n Watch. One Battle After Another (out Thursday in theaters) is as blisteringly fun as it is daringly political, David Sims writes.<\/p>\n Read. A new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, aims to explain why superintelligent AI would eliminate humanity; the authors, however, fail to make a \u201ccase for their claims,\u201d Adam Becker argues.<\/p>\n Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When a person is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, they receive not just a new citizenship but also typically<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[540,4543,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-22614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-americans","9":"tag-letter","10":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n