Since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers, many have designated September 11, 2001 as the true close of the 20th century. That event indeed changed many things in the United States and in the world. It was a sign that the American-led global order established after World War II had become fragile and hollowed out. But in the decades that followed, our leaders clung to the pieties and perspectives of the pre-9/11 period, applying obsolete solutions in a new era with much different problems.
In retrospect, Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign was the true start of the 21st century. He was the first political figure to offer a coherent account of where America had gone wrong – and the first to propose a genuinely different prescription for fixing the rot in our institutions. More than that though, he restored national pride to the center of politics. Approximately 80 percent of Americans said they were proud of their country in January 2001. By the mid-2020s, only 60 percent of Americans said they were proud of their country, with younger Americans being significantly less proud than their Baby Boom and Silent Generation elders. We cannot blame the precipitous decline solely on political polarization. Many Americans across the political spectrum believe both parties have failed to act in the best interests of the nation and its citizens.
On foreign policy, Republicans and Democrats share the blame. President Bush launched a global war on Muslim terrorists, which failed to achieve its stated objectives and gave rhetorical ammunition to our opponents. President Obama expanded Bush’s war through covert action, all the while traveling to Cairo, Strasbourg, Hiroshima and other international destinations to apologize for American power. Months before his messy and embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden declared in June 2021 that “domestic violent extremism” – specifically, white supremacists and so-called “anti-government” groups – was the most urgent terrorist threat to the United States. Obama once ridiculed working-class Americans as “bitter” and backward. Hillary Clinton dismissed them as a “basket of deplorables.” But Biden made the attacks the centerpiece of his agenda.
Democrats have systemically undermined national identity for decades. Rather than acknowledging the people, events, and ideas that contributed to the formation and improvement of our country, Obama and Biden presented tales of racism, discrimination, and inequality as the defining features of the American character. Indeed, Obama once referred to slavery as the country’s “original sin.” This metaphor was not accidental: Original sin can never be erased or expiated. This meant that America was irredeemable.
As national leaders, Obama and Biden taught American history in aberration, using a narrow identity politics to demonstrate that America had wandered away from its founding principles, and that only “collective action” (the federal government) could right this wrong. Both presidents used these narratives to instantiate diversity criteria into federal hiring practices and domestic policy, which atomized and fractured the unity of the American people.
The ancient Greeks had a concept called thumos – a word that is best translated into English as “spiritedness,” but which means something closer to “pride” or “self-respect” when applied to politics. Since America won the Cold War, elites of both parties carried out a long series of policy decisions that worked to kill our sense of self-respect.
Republican politicians unwittingly undermined the United States’ thumos. They made people poorer by gutting the manufacturing sector in pursuit of corporate profit, and they pushed us into unwinnable wars with enormous human, economic, and reputational damage. The Democrats, however, deliberately attacked the nation’s thumos – openly mocking regular Americans, denigrating our culture and history, and implementing a system that put newcomers and illegal immigrants ahead of citizens. By 2020, this dual attack on American pride had reduced regular people to a state of hopelessness – or worse, self-disdain. But people don’t want to feel that way. The strongest retained a flickering sense of pride that awaited someone to stoke the fading embers into a fire of ambition, hope, and self-respect. More than anyone else, that person was Donald Trump. He returned the nation’s faltering thumos, and reminded Americans that they have much of which to be proud.
Trump rekindled enthusiasm for Americanism, both as a feeling of patriotism and a conviction in our culture, customs, and history. He uses words and imagery to spotlight examples of historic greatness to which any American – of any race, sex, class, or religion – can aspire. “Our country was forged and built by the generations of patriots who gave everything they had for our rights and for our freedom,” Trump said in his second inaugural address on January 20, 2025. “They were farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steelworkers and coal miners, police officers and pioneers who pushed onward, marched forward, and let no obstacle defeat their spirit or their pride.”
Where his predecessors fixated on abstract issues like global terrorism, Trump is strategically focused on America’s priorities. “I have no vision for Europe,” Trump said on December 9, 2025. “I have a vision for the United States — America First.” This year, Trump relit the fire in the hearts of the American people. He restored their hope that the future can – and will – be better. In achieving this monumental feat, Trump gave birth to the new century.
John J. Waters is a lawyer. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security from 2020-21. Follow him at @JohnJWaters1 on X. Adam Ellwanger is a professor at University of Houston – Downtown, where he teaches rhetoric and writing. Follow him at @1HereticalTruth on X.
