In a speech at the Claremont Institute last summer, Vice President JD Vance gave a blunt reading of American identity:

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time … it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit them tomorrow?” Vance said.

It is the narrowest, most fallible interpretation of what it means to be American, and it exists only to justify the violent crackdowns on illegal immigration we have seen in the last year.

That much is obvious. Yet, so is the fact that Vance and the Trump administration do see this nation as defined by its people’s sense of shared purpose, only their credo hinges on fealty to its leader rather than the enlightened theories of equality posed by our founders in the Declaration of Independence nearly 250 years ago.

In the last year, the president has waged war on those who have dared to disagree with him. He sued news outlets and froze federal funding for universities like Northwestern, launched investigations of his political opponents and said that the American left followed “the Devil’s ideology.”

Simultaneously, he was forced to stave off ideological insurrection by his own stalwarts. Prominent influencers like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes repeatedly cornered the president on foreign policy issues. Likewise, the president found a number of Republican detractors in Congress over his botched handling of the Epstein scandal, including longtime ally-turned-critic former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who resigned from Congress in January.

But if we take Vance’s word for it, consensus on principles or these issues matters little for procuring a strong sense of identity. For purposes of testing Vance’s heritage theory, let’s use his base of support.

According to Pew Research, in 2024, Trump made significant gains with naturalized voters — voters born outside the United States — splitting the group’s vote approximately half-and-half with his opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris. He gained nine points with this group from 2020 to 2024.

Likewise, Trump made gains with Black and Latino voters in 2024. Taken together, Trump’s movement is as multiracial, multiethnic and multinational as it has ever been.

So if a group cannot unite around a cause because they have no shared heritage, how can they rally behind a “Golden Age?”

They can’t. Vance’s assertion that a nation united by principle is too squishy to endure is a projection of political insecurity: The Make America Great Again movement has neither shared principle nor shared heritage, and that is why it is failing to supplant a nation that has endured because of a consensus on freedom and equality that has — for generations — transcended shared ancestry.

In a massive display of the consensus they are up against, thousands of people flooded the streets of Minneapolis in response to the second killing of an American citizen by federal immigration officials in the city within three weeks. At first, Trump officials portrayed the victims — poet and mother-of-three Renee Nicole Good and Department of Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Pretti — as “domestic terrorists” and “agitators” who sought to inflict harm on law enforcement.

Smartphone video of the incidents called the administration’s bluff, prompting the removal of Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino (made famous by his direction of Chicago’s Operation Midway Blitz) from Minneapolis on Monday. The same day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said there would be an investigation into the Pretti shooting.

The Trump administration’s initial responses to these shootings were not only typical of its public relations strategy. They reflected its broader mission of revising the American story and identity as they see fit.

It is one they are failing to accomplish because the American consensus on the values set forth in its founding documents is much stronger than that of the “Golden Age” founders on exactly what kind of nation they are hoping to create.

As it stands, our government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Against all odds, the protestors in Minneapolis are winning — and that is why I am still shamelessly American.

It’s not for a misplaced optimism or an endorsement of the absurdity of America’s place in the world today — it’s for a confidence that what has united a people for a quarter millennium is much stronger than the temporary fixations that threaten to divide it.

Our inalienable rights, conceived of in the Declaration of Independence, which have perpetuated the endurance of our flawed, ever-evolving representative democracy, are wholly incompatible with this “Golden Age.”

And the “Golden Age” — and all of its benefactors — will lose because of it.

Aidan Klineman is a Medill junior and author of “Off-Campus: White House.” He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.