President Trump’s CPAC speech was a partisan roller coaster inconsistent with Trump’s State of the Union call for a more civil national discourse. But Trump’s CPAC pledge to preserve American “heritage” was not Nazi in nature. To say otherwise is silly and in fact only serves Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interest in dividing America.
I note this in light of CNN analyst Samantha Vinograd’s discussion with host Ana Cabrera on Saturday, in which Vinograd suggested Trump’s speech played to Nazi themes. Saying the word “heritage” implicitly “taps into historically darker times,” Cabrera asked Vinograd for her thoughts. And wow, did Vinograd have some.
“His statement makes me sick,” Vinograd said. “Preserving our heritage, reclaiming our heritage — that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews in the 1940s. But at a national security level, the president talks about preserving our heritage as a catchall for polices that mis-allocate resources.”
Vinograd then suggested that Trump’s desire for a Mexican border wall is motivated by white supremacy and that Trump’s speech served a “to do list” for Putin.
What?
Aside from the hypersonic hypocrisy of former Obama administration officials criticizing weakness toward Putin, Vinograd’s claim here was also hypocritical for another reason. It does exactly that which she blames Trump for doing! Namely, serving Putin’s interest in weakening America by fostering divisions in American life. I would venture that very few conservatives or independents would see either intellectual merit or civil discourse in comparing a reference to American “heritage” to the ideology of a genocidal tyrant.
It’s not clear what Trump meant by preserving “heritage,” but that word is usually not especially scary in an American context. It usually refers to the ideas behind the American Revolution — our legal traditions, our Constitution, etc. It could also have a faith component, a reference to family values or something like that. Or maybe Trump was just fishing for an applause line.
But to assume that Trump meant some kind of Nazi-esque heritage is to also necessarily assume that the CPAC attendees would welcome such a meaning. After all, Trump’s line was scripted and thus designed to elicit the crowd’s favor. There were a fair few idiots at CPAC, but I’m confident that few were Nazis. Just as American positive nationalism is far different from European nationalism, any notion of American heritage that heartens a conservative crowd certainly isn’t going to be Nazi.
But my gripe with Vinograd here goes deeper than that. She claims that Trump is engaged in Big Brother-style baiting, in morphing what Trump said into something he almost certainly did not mean, Vinograd does just the same.
Yes, Putin would have liked Trump’s CPAC attack on Democrats who “hate America.” But the Russian leader would also have enjoyed Vinograd’s efforts to twist Trump’s words on heritage.
