The Patriotism Trump Cannot Own

With the nation’s semiquincentennial fast approaching, President Donald Trump is set to host a July 4 celebration on the National Mall centered, unsurprisingly, on himself. He has called it the “most spectacular Trump rally of them all,” while the White House has billed it as one of the grandest displays of patriotism the world has ever seen.

But true patriotism looks very different from the spectacle Trump has planned.

In 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white mother of five from Detroit, answered Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for volunteers to support the civil rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. The march demanded voting rights. The first attempt had already become known as “Bloody Sunday,” after police attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Liuzzo left her home and drove three days to help. Once in Selma, she staffed a volunteer welcome desk, marched across the Pettus Bridge, and helped transport marchers along the route. After joining the final leg of the march and hearing King speak from the state capital, she volunteered to drive other activists back to Selma that night.

Klansmen shot and killed her on the road.

Liuzzo gave her life as a patriot in service to her country. Not out of blind faith. Not out of nationalism. She died because she believed America had a duty to become what it claimed to be.

“My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity,” her husband, Anthony Liuzzo, told President Lyndon Johnson after learning of her death. “She had one concern and only one in mind.”

Her concern was the promise written into the nation’s founding creed: all people are created equal.

Trump offers a different vision. His version of patriotism is rooted in martial nationalism, blood-and-soil citizenship, and authoritarian fantasies about cleansing the country of perceived enemies. In this vision, some people are granted the rights promised by the Declaration of Independence, while others are excluded.

Americans have always struggled over competing visions of patriotism. Conservatives have long claimed the mantle for themselves while casting liberals, progressives, labor activists, socialists, feminists, LGBTQ people, Black Americans, immigrants, and dissenters as subversive or treasonous. Efforts to suppress those voices often arrived wrapped in a flag, with the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other.

Trump has pushed this tradition further. He hugs the flag, uses the Bible as a prop, calls political opponents “the enemy within,” describes immigrants as “vermin,” and speaks of those who oppose him as if they are less than human. As for the Constitution, he has said he does not know whether he is required to uphold it. In Trump’s world, patriotism is measured by loyalty to his personal counter-subversive vision.

This is not love of country. It is devotion to hierarchy.

True patriotism begins with the Declaration’s promise of equality. Political philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote that national pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Self-improvement is the essence of real patriotism. Every great movement of American progress has tried to force the country to live up to the words written in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Abolitionists, especially Black abolitionists, were among the first to turn the Declaration into a new constitutional politics. The Anti-Slavery Society called its preamble the cornerstone of the Temple of Freedom. Frederick Douglass called it the ringbolt in the chain of the nation’s destiny.

For Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration was the central principle of the United States. He saw it as the moral core of the republic. The Constitution, in his view, existed to protect the Declaration’s promise, not to smother it. Lincoln later consecrated this idea at Gettysburg, declaring the nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The same ideal animated the suffragists. At Seneca Falls in 1848, the Declaration of Sentiments announced that all men and women are created equal. This became a central refrain of the women’s suffrage movement until women won the right to vote in 1920, and it continued to guide later feminist efforts for equal rights.

The Declaration also inspired the labor movement. Workers recognized exploitation by capital as another form of tyranny. In 1938, the Steelworkers’ Declaration of Independence argued that political liberty meant little when economic inequality created a new despotism in industry.

The civil rights movement returned again to the Declaration’s unfinished promise. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called it a promissory note America had defaulted on. He said America had handed Black citizens a bad check marked “insufficient funds,” but he refused to believe the bank of justice was bankrupt.

This is the language of genuine patriotism. It does not hide from national failure. It names failure, confronts it, and demands repair. James Baldwin captured this tradition when he wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Trump’s patriotism belongs to the opposite tradition: narrow, exclusionary, and hostile to equality. He did not invent it.

The Constitution itself was designed in part to restrain the democratic claims unleashed by the Revolution. John Adams called the equality promised by the Declaration “a fraud.” Many founders did not believe “all men” truly meant all men. Black people, women, Native tribes, and others were excluded, and the Constitution preserved many of those exclusions.

The Southern slave aristocracy became the most forceful defender of anti-egalitarian politics. John C. Calhoun called the Declaration’s promise of equality “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” In 1848, while debating Oregon’s admission as a free state, he said there was “not a word of truth” in the proposition.

The Supreme Court briefly constitutionalized this view in Dred Scott, with Chief Justice Roger Taney declaring that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Anti-egalitarian attitudes also migrated into the economy. Corporate barons used them to justify domination of workers. Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography that any democratic effort to make men equal was an effort to block progress.

The same logic remains visible today. Modern conservatives often claim efforts to repair past inequality are themselves unequal because they inconvenience the white majority. Far-right billionaire Elon Musk has warned of white replacement and racial subjugation. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who helped bankroll JD Vance’s Senate campaign, has rejected the universalism of the Declaration and once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” blaming part of that incompatibility on women gaining the right to vote.

Meanwhile, the conservative Supreme Court, backed by the Trump administration and the Republican Party, has ended affirmative action and weakened the Voting Rights Act through claims of unequal treatment against whites. Trump’s anti-DEI campaign draws from the same tradition, using equality as a weapon against equality itself.

The patriotism Trump hopes to stage on July 4 is rooted in this anti-egalitarian, anti-Declaration ethos. It is privatized, sectarian, narcissistic, and authoritarian. It is everything democracy is not.

No one should be surprised. Trump is a vain billionaire who led an effort to overturn an election, seeks to destroy the 14th Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship, and believes in natural hierarchies of blood, heredity, and power.

But his celebration also creates an opportunity. It gives Americans a chance to reject the false patriotism of nationalism and reaffirm the true promise of the country: equality.

The spirit that led Viola Liuzzo to give her life for her country still lives. It lives in Americans who refuse to accept abuse, injustice, and persecution. It lives in people who stand against mass deportations and state violence. It lives in those who defend strangers because citizenship, decency, and humanity demand it.

That patriotism outshines Trump’s narrow vision. It reminds us that the revolutionary spirit of 1776 rests not in rallies, flags, aircraft flyovers, or one man’s vanity parade. It rests in the people.

To uphold the country’s true ideal, we must repair or replace the frame that failed it. As Thomas Paine wrote near the founding moment, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”