Has America Ever Been Great: Donald Trump and the Making of America

by Kenneth A. Vandergriff

The rise of Donald Trump in the Presidential Race baffles me.  He has little to no political experience, his rhetoric is demeaning and at times outright hateful, and his following continues to grow.  What began with an off-color comment about Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle grew to building a wall on the Mexican border.  While I condemn both comments I understand that some Americans desire a wall on the border.  What is troubling to me is the way in which Trump’s rhetoric is continuing to escalate and that it is couched in religiosity.

After the Paris attacks Trump called for bombing the sh*t out of terrorists and began to make suggestions that to make America great again the Muslims had to go.  His comments were regarded by many as vile but at least one pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas, applauded his comments.  This has escalated to recent comments by Trump that torture is a good means of gleaning information from terrorists and that killing terrorists family members is also a solution.  The nail in the coffin is the endorsement of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.  In a recent interview with CNN, Trump was asked to disavow Duke and the Klan.  He did not.  He later blamed an earpiece for his guffaw.  Trump’s rhetoric of hate for those who are not white Americans further deepen the racial and ethnic divide in the country.

What will make America great again?  For Donald Trump it sounds a lot like what Hitler suggested.  Trump’s rhetoric leads one to believe that making America great again requires making America white again.  It is not a great leap from building a wall to building camps for Muslims or black and brown citizens.  My fear is that America didn’t heed the warnings of the Holocaust.  My bigger fear is that all of this is couched in religious rhetoric.  Donald Trump wants to stand up for Christians and claims he is persecuted for his faith.  He must be reading a different Bible than I read.  Donald Trump wants to ignore the issues or build a wall rather than engage the issues surrounding immigration and pluralism in the United States.

Moreover, I’m not convinced America was ever really great.  America has a history of systematically exterminating people who aren’t white.  White “Americans” systematically exterminated the Native American people, using tactics as vile as blankets infected with small pox.  Again, Americans would rather ignore that this happened than face the ramifications of biological warfare for the sake of colonialism.  White Americans systematically targeted black people for slavery until 1865, though it should be noted that the Emancipation Proclamation was not an overnight “fix” to the system of slavery.  Likewise modern day slavery exists in the United States in the form of migrant workers, many of whom live in squalor.  My point is simply that American may have never been great.  It is obvious that the racially charged rhetoric couched in religion is doing nothing to fix the problem.

Kenneth Vandergriff is a graduate student at Campbell University Divinity School, a father of four, and a minister. He will pursue a PhD at Florida State University in the fall. 

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