Trump is Not a Patriot

In this age of unfathomable cruelty and suffering, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But I want to highlight one individual, and one campaign, for you to consider supporting. The individual is Abdullah Awwad, a surgeon in the Gaza Strip I interviewed last year. He’s been working for years in horrifying conditions. He’s been accepted to multiple overseas medical programs but needs the money to leave Gaza with his family.

The campaign is by Shir Tikvah, the synagogue whose rabbi, Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, I interviewed last week. It’s to raise money for people harmed by ICE’s assault on the Twin Cities. Please consider supporting both of these efforts.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sari Bashi, founder of Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, the leading Israeli human rights group offering legal assistance to Palestinians. She’s also author of the new memoir, Upside-Down Love, about her love affair with a Palestinian professor confined by Israel to the West Bank city of Ramallah. We’ll talk about her story of love in the face of institutional oppression, and about Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement, particularly in Gaza, where despite a so-called “cease-fire,” Palestinians remain largely unable to enter or leave the Strip.

Reader Survey

We created a super-short, four question, survey to see how subscribers feel about the Beinart Notebook. If you have 5 minutes, please fill it out. It will help us figure what topics to cover, and what guests to interview, in the coming year.

Cited in Today’s Video

I wrote about patriotism and nationalism for The Atlantic in 2018.

How the UAE bribed Trump to give it America’s most sensitive technology.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

For Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace.”

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Jaser Abu Mousa, a 2025 Yale Peace Fellow and past program officer working for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in Gaza, about life and death in the Gaza Strip.

For one day, The Nation magazine devoted its entire website to writing about Gaza, by writers from Gaza.

After years of disputing the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll numbers, Israel now accepts them.

Eve Fairbanks writes about the American right’s nostalgia for apartheid South Africa.

Appearances

On February 9, I’ll be virtually speaking to Our Common Beliefs.

On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.

On Feb 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.

On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.

Reader Comment

Occasionally, I publish readers’ responses to my videos. Here’s one from Deborah Seligsohn, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, about my criticism of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for its criticism of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s suggestion that a child in Minnesota may one day write a book like Anne Frank’s.

“I went to the US Holocaust Museum with my Dad (whose father had died in a concentration camp), an incredibly moving experience. I can’t remember exactly when we went, except that I was carrying my baby in a front pack, and that I think for both of us being able to hold on to precious new life was emotionally what got us through. But what I also remember, which is why I want to mention it to you, is that there was an exhibit about the abuses in Bosnia (and this had to be before Srebrenica - it was probably November 1994 that we went, and Srebrenica was July 1995). The Museum was making a direct analogy to the holocaust. So, if they are now saying that analogies are always impermissible, that is a new point of view or more likely a rather selective one. My recollection of the museum was that you started at the top with the 1930s and worked down through 3 levels that end with the death camps, and then there is another level below that is about other genocides - or at least it was when I went - and that area was about Bosnia. When I look at their website, they have a huge section on other genocides in their genocide prevention section. What is striking there is that genocide is pretty broadly construed, except with the glaring missing discussion of the Palestinians.”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, this was a somewhat difficult evening, for me on Sunday evening as my hometown New England Patriots lost in the Super Bowl. But, actually, the word patriots got me thinking earlier in the week because I was looking for some merchandise about the New England Patriots and, when I was searching online, what I noticed was that if you search up, kind of, hats or t-shirts with the word ‘patriots,’ you get a lot of MAGA stuff—that this word ‘patriot’ is actually a very MAGA-coded word.

On the national Sirius radio network, for instance, the conservative channel with people like Sean Hannity and all these other guys is called the Patriot Radio Network. And I was thinking there’s something very strange about the fact that the term patriot is so coded as a right-wing MAGA word because Donald Trump is so obviously not a patriot. He’s the least patriotic president probably we’ve ever had. And, you know, if patriot means that you put your country above yourself, right, Donald Trump clearly does the opposite in these really blatant ways.

So, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that a sheikh connected to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates had put a huge amount of money into Trump’s cryptocurrency business, and then as president Trump turned around and gave the UAE these very advanced microchips that the United States had never been willing to give the UAE before, right?

So, basically, a bribe where you put money in Trump’s pocket, and he does something that at least his predecessors didn’t think was in the national interest. Or this insane story where, basically, Trump is saying the federal government won’t pay for the continual building of this rail network between New York and New Jersey unless they rename Penn Station after Donald Trump. So, Donald Trump has claimed very clearly his ego is more important than whether people in New York and New Jersey basically have good rail service. So, this is the antithesis of patriotism.

And so, it’s an interesting question why is it that this term, ‘patriot,’ is so coded as a MAGA right-wing word when the embodiment of MAGA is so clearly not a patriot? And I think one reason perhaps is it’s based on a kind of confusion between the idea of patriotism and nationalism. One way of thinking about that difference, although there are others, is that nationalism means putting your country above other countries. And so, Donald Trump is, in a certain sense, a nationalist, right? I mean, he’s very hostile to global cooperation. His general view is that international affairs are zero-sum, and he wants to make weaker countries knuckle under to the United States.

But that patriotism is different than nationalism. Patriotism is not about the relationship of your country to other countries. It’s about the relationship of the individual to the country, right? And about the question of whether the individual will sacrifice their own self-interest for the collective good.

One way of thinking about this difference, actually, is to compare the slogan that Trump had—‘America First’—to the slogan that John McCain had when he ran in 2008, which was ‘Country First,’ right? So, you know, Trump’s slogan, ‘America First,’ is based on the idea that supposedly these other politicians haven’t put America first because they’ve cared too much about other countries. God forbid they, you know, they were concerned about people dying of treatable diseases in Africa or something like that, right? And Donald Trump will have no moral obligation whatsoever to any country other than the United States.

But what McCain was saying by ‘Country First’ was something very different. It wasn’t about America’s relationship with other countries. It was about the relationship of the individual to the country, and he was kind of holding himself up as an exemplar of the idea that people should make sacrifices for the country. And even though I disagreed with a lot of John McCain’s political views, he clearly had made tremendous sacrifices for the country. He’d been tortured in a, you know, North Vietnamese prison when he served in the U.S. military during Vietnam. And Trump mocked him for that, right, because Trump really has no ability to understand, to imagine why anyone would actually put the collective good—the national good in this case—above their own self-interest. For him, that just makes you a sucker and an idiot, right? But John McCain was actually talking about patriotism when Donald Trump is talking about nationalism.

And so, my hope is that people will better understand the difference of these terms, and that we may come to a day in the future in which I can celebrate the success of my hometown New England Patriots, and that progressives actually can celebrate the reclaiming of this term, patriot, because I think it’s clear today that progressives, in their willingness to sacrifice for the collective good—we see it, you know, in most extraordinary terms in Minnesota, but all over the place—are showing much, much deeper degree of patriotism than Trump and his cronies, who are basically willing to sell out the interests of the country in order to flatter their own egos and put money in their pockets.

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