" So long as he is president, Donald Trump will have two things going for him.
The first is the loony left, which diminished the Martin Luther King holiday with dips in the fever swamps.
Bernie Sanders bellowed: “We now have a president of the United States who is a racist.” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Caucus Chairman, called Mr. Trump “the grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” A Hollywood actress said MAGA hats are “the new white hood.” This self-indulgent political narcissism is why average voters can’t warm to progressivism.
The other thing Mr. Trump has going for him is that no one expects much of him. Given a choice, he’ll take the low road. Imagine how electrifying it would be if he ended the government shutdown by unexpectedly taking the high road. It could still happen.
During one of his presidential campaign rallies, Mr. Trump riffed about building a wall at the border, and the crowd roared approval. With a preternatural sense of pay dirt, Mr. Trump has stuck with the wall ever since. His early travel ban was a “wall” issue.
Democrats instantly translated the wall into anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism, and not without reason. Mr. Trump hasn’t made much effort to mitigate this charge.
Until Saturday. Included in the deal the president offered Democrats to end the government shutdown was a three-year extension of the Dreamers’ legal status, but more intriguing, a commitment to hold weekly meetings at the White House on immigration.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed this offer as a “non-starter” before Mr. Trump delivered his talk. Amid this increasingly bitter standoff, something remarkable also happened Saturday: Mr. Trump held a naturalization ceremony for new American citizens in the Oval Office. You’d have to possess Chuck Schumer’s unshakable impassivity not to have been moved by this ritual passage into American citizenship.
Democrats have made a strategic decision to typecast Mr. Trump and anyone who supports him as hostile to immigration and therefore racist, in the expectation that some voters will recoil. Left unanswered, it might work.
Is some percentage of the Trump base irreconcilably nativist? No doubt some are. But what happened during that Oval Office naturalization ceremony gets us closer to the real immigration issue.
The difficulty and anguish over immigration for Americans across the political spectrum isn’t about keeping people out of the country but what happens to them after they arrive. The issue is assimilation. The issue is the idea of being an American.
That is hardly a new thought. But it is also hard to overstate the intensity of the political challenge the progressive left is making today against widely held assumptions about Americans’ common heritage.
Intellectuals on the left have long argued that the melting pot is a myth, as are beliefs about the settlement of the frontier. Today these debatable ideas have become an insistent claim that the building of America—mostly by European immigrants—was morally flawed and requires constant repudiation.
And repudiate they do. This week, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, announced the permanent covering of some famous 19th-century murals depicting encounters between Christopher Columbus’s landing party and Indian tribes. Amid an explanation that is a parody of current atonement declarations, Father Jenkins asserts, “Whatever else Columbus’s arrival brought . . .” Well, that’s that for the last 500 years.
New immigrants to the U.S. have become bystanders and casualties in a larger argument about the nation’s identity, to which the border wall is a long footnote.
Here’s one of the possible questions on the naturalization civics test: “What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance?” Answer: “the United States and the flag.”
Put that question to Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Beto O’Rourke or Elizabeth Warren and what you’ll get is endless qualifying “buts” and guilt-tripping bows. The party’s left would simply delete the Pledge question.
Against this pressure, Donald Trump may be the one person able to make a national argument for a more traditional, less fractured, more optimistic idea of America’s appropriate identity.
That’s what most of his base and most of the country really want—the renewal of the melting pot as an aspirational goal; a reassertion of who we are, not a death struggle over deportations, bans and family separations. That’s the real meaning of the MAGA hats, which its wearers would explain if anyone bothered to ask. Mr. Trump saw what this idea looked like at that naturalization ceremony. He moved to higher ground with Saturday’s three-year DACA extension. With Mrs. Pelosi stuck on “no,” Mr. Trump could take the immigration issue away from the Democrats forever by proposing permanent legal status for the Dreamers, plus a promise to attend their naturalization ceremonies after he retires from office.
The State of the Union is always a good venue for taking the high road. Even from the steps of the U.S. Capitol. "
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