I don’t like the phrase “not my president.” I understand the sentiment, but I think it would be a more accurate reflection of that sentiment to say, “not my America.” Trump’s America is not my America in exactly the same sense that Nazi Germany was not Einstein’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy was not Umberto Eco’s Italy. Authoritarianism, Nazism, and fascism may be overlaid onto America, Germany, or Italy, and when a person is imprisoned or dies fighting these overlays, he or she has been imprisoned or died for America, Germany, or Italy.
This thought was inspired by something I read recently of a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany whose dying breath was, “For Germany.” That is, her death was for a vision of Germany that included her–which is the very sort of Germany that in fact exists today.
Those of us in the Trump resistance are keeping alive the torch of America–the America that will once again embrace all of us as equal citizens, with no individual deemed an “enemy of the People” or rendered suspicious for being a journalist or scientist, or for not having the right religious beliefs or skin color, or for being oppositional to presidential or federal power, or for exercising the rights guaranteed in our Constitution and First Amendment.
I like the cover of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. It shows a symbol of America–El Capitan in Yosemite–overlaid with a Nazi swastika. The swastika is America’s foreign element, not its native element.
We need to remember that in–what shall we call it?–TrumpAmerica.
Prometheus Unbound 
The thing that worries me is that people who care about the America or the West that is built on principles are reluctant to analyze how this civilization emerged. If it was through ideas being spread and adopted we should see Westernized countries everywhere. Instead we only see them in Northwest Europe and descendants of that region. It’s a recipe for success and yet even Eastern Europe, that now has the chance to choose freely is turning its back on Western culture.
Whether this resistance to Western influence is cultural or, as I suspect, genetic, the immigration to the Western countries is an immigration of these other cultures. People from these cultures persist in their own ways while making demands on Western societies, who in turn respond with appeasement, causing a continuous erosion of their own culture. It’s a demographical deathtrap. The Blacks, Irish (and especially Scotch-Irish), Italians, Jews, were all early contributors to this process, as substantial minorities of these groups were more concerned with their own, than with the surrounding society. I fear that now you have come to the point where no one wants a president of America, but only a president of their tribe. If you dislike Trump you should dislike BLM too as they represent the same thing – ethnically based tribal politics that undermine the Western ideals America was built on.
Ultimately this all comes back to the WEIRD Northwest Europeans’ inability to deal with outgroups, essentially thinking outgroups don’t exist, that we can all get along and that we can all be shaped into principled world/Western citizens. But everything we’ve seen so far indicates that this is a false assumption. There isn’t a country on Earth that has been Westernized other than through immigration from Northwest Europe. And there is no Western country that hasn’t been undermined by immigration. The great paradox that WEIRDos don’t grasp is that Western universalism is only applicable to Western populations. So if you care about America and other Western countries and what they stand for you need to look into this possibility, without shying away from its politically incorrect implications. Before it’s too late.
Staffan,
Sorry for the late reply. Very busy of late. I just want to say that I do not downplay your concerns about immigration. It is an outrage, for example, that Jews are no longer safe in France.
The far left allied with Islamic authoritarianism against Jews and secular liberals in Europe may very well destroy the liberal and feminist character and culture of Europe over time. It’s awful, I agree.
In the United States, however, I think the threat from Islam, culturally, is vastly exaggerated.
Nations have the prerogative to control borders, but once a population of citizens is established (who’s in, who’s out), it is important that Anglo-French Enlightenment liberalism among those citizens is fiercely guarded (civil rights, due process, separation of powers, a free and oppositional press, etc.).
Trump is an overreaction to cultural fluidity, as are nationalist, Brexit-style, reactions in Europe. Border enforcement, yes. The crack-up of the European Union? No.
One thing that worries me about Trump is his attempt to essentially ethnically cleanse a third of the Hispanic population from the United States (about eleven million people). These are people who came here in the first place because of civil wars and cultural upheaval brought on during the Cold War (in Nicaragua and El Salvador, etc.), and because agribusiness and the construction industry wanted loose border control for cheap labor. Many of these undocumented immigrants have built lives in the United States, have had children in the United States, etc. They are being treated as a political football, and Congress and Trump could fix this. I say: close the border for future illegal immigrants, but grant amnesty to those here. Then get on with the American version of the Anglo-French Enlightenment experiment.
I think you make a mistake in treating Muslims as an anomaly when there is plenty of evidence that they are more likely the extreme end of a spectrum of clannishness. The tip of the iceberg is terrorism and sharia patrol. But then you have the more average cultures that come with more everyday problems that, while making less headlines, will nonetheless undermine the West. Things like corruption and organized crime and just a general priority of their own group over society.
As the blogger https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/ (I urge you or anyone else to have a look at it, because it’s not just speculation, she has a lot of data to back it up with) has shown, differing levels of inbreeding or outbreeding (along with some other factors, but I don’t want to get to bogged down in details) in the ancestral past tells us a lot of why cultures differ today in terms of clannishness. In Europe the spectrum ranges from English, Other NW Europeans, and then you get more clannishness the further southeast you go. And when Europeans left for America they brought the corresponding level of clannishness to the New World. And there is a huge amount of evidence on how ethnic groups persist in their ways. Just as an example, if you look at the GSS, people who say it’s ok to cheat on taxes by ancestry show this pattern almost perfectly. From the least cheating to the most you have, English, Other Northwest European (excluding Ireland), Other Southern European, German, Irish, Central/Eastern European, Italian. The anomaly here is “Other Southern European, but it was a very small sample.
And now you say keeping 11 million Hispanics who are likely at least as clannish as (Southern) Italians, is the decent thing to do. At a time when it’s clear that Enlightenment values are eroding. Most students who object to free speech are not Muslims; they’re of European descent. They show just how easily institutions that should uphold Englightenment values can be corrupted. The West is already carrying a heavy load. Unless drastic measures are taken it will collapse. Not necessarily by Muslims terrorist, but by a gradual shift into something like Mexico or Greece.