President Donald Trump and the Democrats are fighting over the national flag, America’s preeminent patriotic symbol.
Democrats know it’s a problem that they’re accurately seen as often being anti-American in their policies (e.g., mass illegal immigration) and worldview (e.g., shouting that the United States is irredeemably racist). So on flag day, they handed out little 4-inch-by-6-inch Stars and Stripes in Washington, D.C., with the message, “Patriotism does not belong to one party.” Political denials point to ugly truths. Democrats have allowed Republicans to own patriotism by squandering it themselves.
Blue party efforts to seem patriotic will probably dwindle into unconvincing subgenres such as “protest is patriotic,” “all are welcome,” and “it’s wonderful that so many Islamists want to be Americans.” But until it is exposed as cynical, I’ll take it as a good-faith effort to renew the Left’s allegiance to the nation. It is a good thing, for national unity, not partisanship, that Democrats can see their fault even if they don’t confess it.
While Democrats distributed their tiny flags, Trump, characteristically, was readying the installation of two enormous American flags on 100-foot poles on the North and South Lawns of the White House. They were ceremonially hoisted and now unfurl, float, and ripple in the hot summer breeze blowing across the nation’s capital city.
Trump’s flag-raising, like so much that he does, was praiseworthy in principle but questionable in execution. This is also the way the public sees Trump — many of his proposals and policies are popular, but people wish he could implement them without making the nation wince. The main problem with Trump has always been aesthetic, as even his harshest critics used to acknowledge.
The new White House flags are startlingly excessive. They magnify the patriotic symbolism of the executive mansion, which had previously been surmounted only by a small national flag flying inconspicuously on the roof. But they are out of keeping with the aesthetic of the building beside which they stand. The White House and its Palladian portico are big enough to be an appropriately grand home for the president, but not so big as to be bombastic. You can’t say that about the flags.
Trump’s flags, which he paid for himself, are the sort you’d expect to see looming over an auto dealership beside a highway, not dominating classical architecture that aptly expresses America’s elegant and restrained constitutional design.
Trump’s view on everything is that you have to go big or go home. In this thinking, it follows that if the flag is great, a huge flag must be better. That’s just how he rolls, and many people love it. It’s often not pretty, but it is undeniably a strength.
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Democrats are just beginning to appreciate again that the national flag exerts unique power over the national imagination, but Trump has always known this. So he embraces the flag, sometimes literally, and he wants it to enfold him. The Pledge of Allegiance, after all, is first to the flag and only second to the nation for which it stands.
We have recently been through a period when the idea of America was attacked perhaps more venomously than ever before. One hopes we are emerging from that dark and dispiriting time. Ordinary Americans want the nation respected, and they want its flag respected and raised, too.