Attribution: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Geoff Carter
Republican J.D. Vance says it is his love of country that informs his vision of America. When accepting the nomination as Donald Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention, he said (referring to himself, his running mate Donald Trump, and the MAGA base), “We love our country, and we are united to win.”
And of course, who can forget (and we have tried) the somewhat disturbing image of Trump hugging an American flag—a very smarmy and creepy expression of love for country. Tim Walz is right. That’s just plain weird—and a little gross. These men might say they love their country, but as it turns out, their declarations are nothing but lies and hollow promises.
In a country as vast and diverse as America, love of country can mean many different things. Margaret Atwood once said, “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.” To a veteran, love of country might mean defending the Constitution. To an artist or musician, love of country might mean freedom of artistic expression—as guaranteed by the Constitution. To a journalist, love of country might mean the right to the relentless pursuit of truth iterated in the First Amendment. To a jurist, love of country might the implementation due process and the right to a fair and speedy trial for each and every citizen. To an immigrant, love of country might mean hope and opportunity and a chance for a better future.
On the other hand, to one-percenters Donald Trump or an Elon Musk, love of country means unfettered and unregulated capitalism. To a white supremacist, it might mean the right to be racist—in the name of free speech. To a MAGA Republican, love of country might mean returning to an idyllic white suburban utopia of the past (which never really existed, except on network television.) To J.D. Vance, love of country means a society in which marriage is sacred and single women are pariahs.
This sort of love espoused by Trump and Vance is not genuinely loving something or someone for what they really are. Rather, it’s a form of absolute control. They say they love America, but not America as it is. They want to change it according to their own MAGA Christian nationalistic white supremacist vision. They don’t love the America we all know and love. They would change it into something unrecognizable.
In the movie Vertigo, James Stewart’s character John Ferguson becomes obsessed with a woman named Carlotta. After she dies in a fall, he is traumatized. After he recovers, he sees another woman resembling his dead Carlotta, he befriends her and, after they become lovers, he attempts to remake his new girlfriend into his long-lost Carlotta. He buys her new clothes and makes her change her hair until she becomes—in his eyes—the woman he lost.
The United States is the Republican Party’s Carlotta. They don’t love her as she is. They don’t even like her as she is. She’s too wild, too different, with too many new and crazy ideas like reproductive freedom, fair taxation, affordable health care, common sense gun control, affordable childcare, and the need to control climate change.
Vance, while cloaking himself in the mantle of family values, has said that single women and childless couples are anti-American. He has proposed higher taxes and less voting power for those people who choose not to have children.
These types of policy are amplified in Project 2025, the expansive manual for the far-right overhaul of America. Sponsored by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and rooted deeply in the ideologies of Christian nationalism, Project 2025 is a step-by-step manual for dismantling our democracy and replacing it with an authoritarian regime. It would greatly expand presidential power, replace the civil service with presidential loyalists, gut social services like Medicare and Social Security, ignore the consequences of climate change, abolish the Department of Education, and install a nationwide abortion ban, even carrying restrictions of reproductive rights to the point where government agencies would monitor pregnancies.
This type of existential overhaul does not reflect love for country. This is the of sort of “love” is selfish and manipulative. This sort of behavior is symptomatic of an abusive relationship. America’s beauty is democracy, the concept that everyone, no matter their resources, background, or origins, is equal before the law. Americans are free to express themselves, to take advantage of public education, and to pursue whatever form of happiness they desire. To love our country is to understand that our personal freedoms are inextricably wound into everyone’s freedoms. J.D. Vance’s love of country is something quite different.
Vance, Trump, and other MAGA adherents, including usual suspects Marjory Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz, along with Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, support the plot to shred our Constitution and overturn the American democracy. Their professed love of country is the false promise of a selfish gold digger or gigolo. They’ll promise the moon and the stars and profess their undying love—they’ll promise anything to get what they want.
Or, as in the case in many abusive relationships, Trump, Vance, and the MAGA bullies attempt to intimidate the country they “love” with fear and hate. The type of “love” they profess is tainted, poisoned, the love of an obsessed stalker or an abusive husband.
They have no respect for the democratic foundations on which America was founded, they have no empathy for the people who work, struggle, and live her, and they have no plans for this country except to exploit it.
These MAGAs love nothing but themselves. Although they may wrap themselves in the American flag, they are in reality wolves in sheep’s clothing—and they will rip this country apart if we let them.