Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has signed countless executive orders, from making English the official language of the country and expanding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. Trump is no orthodox president—he signed 26 executive orders on the first day of his presidency, exceeding the nine signed by Joe Biden on his first day. Therefore, it is especially crucial to analyze what kind of American identity Trump is trying to convey—or at times, prescribe—to the country and consider its larger implications.
It is no secret that Trump’s actions signal a return to 19th-century American imperialism with actions like renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and talking about making Canada the “51st state.” All of these hearken back to a time when American economic and military power enabled the concept of manifest destiny and the country rationalized its actions through appeals to religion, morality, and white superiority.
Executive orders that seem to have no intent in imperialism are also rationalized under similar criteria; for example, banning transgender athletes from sports is a statement about the validity of trans athletes in the first place. This has been prompted by an underlying disagreement with a more paramount value, which can be easily compared to manifest destiny in the 19th century, or Christian nationalism in the 21st century. Trump is creating a new identity based on neo-imperialism, fueled by his contempt for any ideology incompatible with its proliferation.
Other executive actions that seem to have a personal basis rather than an ideological one can nonetheless be analyzed with similar criteria. For example, Trump’s order pausing the prosecution of Americans accused of bribing government officials may have been to protect his office from any future legal troubles, but it is itself also a statement about his ethos: that he possesses the power to overcome legal limitations when he desires to, since his rationality is defined by values superior to any other values, or so he thinks. The same applies to his pardoning of January 6 defendants and the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
At Colby, you can find monuments and plaques from throughout the college’s history, giving us glimpses of the identity it possessed over the past two centuries. We see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech to Waterville College on the Miller Lawn flag post, asking the rhetorical question of “who would not, if it could be made certain that the new morning of universal liberty should rise on our race by the perishing of one generation—who would not consent to die?”
We also see the countless names of Colby alumni killed in action during the World Wars, Korean War, and Vietnam War. It would be naive to argue that Colby and its graduates were at the front lines to protect universal liberty through its participation in the wars and other historic events. However, it must be kept in mind that the current Trump administration, especially with its careful balancing of values, is making a transformation from inclusive values to exclusive values; from ideas that unite to ideas that make people point at each other.
As of March 7, Trump cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University, to address what the White House considered the “school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment.” On the same issue, Bowdoin College suspended eight of its students last month over an on-campus pro-Palestine protest. Although Bowdoin’s suspension of its students came before Trump’s formal announcement of defunding Columbia, it is difficult not to consider the college’s decision a reaction to the current administration, by reanalyzing the college’s values to better align with those being prescribed by the executive branch.
Reordering and reanalyzing values must come with the passage of time; yet when it is motivated by external pushes, especially when you are threatened to reorder your values, the adjustment cannot be sound. Therefore, let yourself be the truest observer of them all, going through painstaking work to transcend the subjectivity that is our human nature. Only if the impulse to adjust values comes from within can we become a true participant in the world.
~ Benjamin Ha `27
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