Citizenship live: tawdry and illegal
Trump’s enraging convention charade
I watched the Republican National Convention from start to finish for two days. I’m a former Republican and a Never Trumper, so I understand that none of it was meant to speak to me. But none of it actually enraged me until the moment President Donald Trump seized one of the most sacred rituals of America, the creation of new citizens, and exploited it for his own purposes.
Before I say another word about Trump, I want to congratulate my new fellow citizens. Your addition to our nation is a joy, part of the miracle of America. Welcome home.
But how sad, how wrong it was, that their first moments as citizens were spent in a White House full of people almost certainly engaged in breaking the law while their new chief executive treated them as nothing more than props in a political spectacle.
While the president and vice president are not subject to the Hatch Act (the law that prohibits government employees from using their positions for political activity), everyone else in the White House surely is, and they all worked with a political party to hold a campaign event on government property using government resources. The actual oath was administered by acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, a Trump sycophant who is illegally occupying his Cabinet office.
What the president did was tasteless and hollow; what Wolf did was probably illegal. And all of it was an offense to our traditions. As journalist Susan Glasser noted at that moment: “It’s like the lawyers told Trump all the partisan things that you are not supposed to do in the White House — and he said great, let’s do them all on TV during the Republican convention.”
Sadly, we have become numb to his many offenses, large and small, against the law and the Constitution. Trump’s people have long regarded the Hatch Act in particular with open contempt: Nearly a dozen senior Trump officials have been reprimanded for violations, but that doesn’t matter to any of them.
Hatch Act applies to me
“I honestly don’t care” about violating the Hatch Act, Lynne Patton, a Trump appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said last year. When challenged, she tweeted: “What part about ‘I don’t give a sh-t’ don’t you understand?”
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows continued this tradition Wednesday, telling Politico: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.”
Well, I care about the Hatch Act because I care about the law, and because it applies directly to me. I teach at a U.S. military institution, and I am considered a “less restricted” employee who can participate freely in partisan activity so long as I make clear that I do not represent the views of the government or do so on government property or with government resources. Through 25 years of service, I have not found these requirements difficult or unfair. (This article was written on my own computer with my own electricity.)
This has not stopped Trump’s most ardent supporters — the kind who likely applauded the convention’s flouting of the law — from demanding, for years, that the Hatch Act should be invoked to fire or discipline me for expressing my views. Such people believe that laws exist not for the common good but as tools to punish their political opponents. The Trumpist maxim, always, is the one often attributed to 1930s Peruvian military leader Oscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Trump perverted the naturalization ceremony in two other ways. First, he listed these citizens’ accomplishments as though their credentials mattered. One was “a phenomenal success”; another spoke multiple languages; another had a Ph.D. It’s wonderful that they are people of achievement, and Trump might have meant to showcase their talents, but it sounded like the last round of a hiring panel. (“Great going,” Trump said, as if they had landed new junior executive gigs.)
Grandson and dad of immigrants
I felt this keenly thinking of my immigrant grandparents, who came from Ireland and Greece as people of the lowest station, broke and uneducated. America accepted them because they accepted America, not because they passed some sort of social status check. They asked for a chance. America gave them one.
My daughter, born in Russia, is also an immigrant. It was among the happiest moments of my life when our plane touched down in Boston to drape a flag around the carrier of a tired and confused toddler who didn’t realize that a great nation had accepted her as its own and made her not only my child but a child as well of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. She didn’t have to pass the SAT or speak five foreign languages. (Frankly, she didn’t yet speak anything at all.)
Worst of all, by making the oath of citizenship part of a partisan convention reality show with Trump as the special guest star, the president turned it into an oath not to the Constitution but to himself. Trump then tried to give a short speech, his usual stumbling over words he had not read. In a telling moment, he got stuck and had to ad-lib, referring to “the rights so dear to every American” as “granted by us.” This, of course, is the very opposite of the American conception of rights. He corrected himself to say “and granted by God,” for what little it mattered.
Trump is not the first president to administer the naturalization oath. Other presidents have taken pride in this beloved act. But he is the first to tarnish it as the instrument of a cult of personality, and to cheapen it like everything else he has touched.
By the way, in case it wasn’t clear: My views do not reflect those of the U.S. government.
Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.” The views expressed here are solely his own.