Making America America Again

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American Greatness

Making America America Again

By Stephen B. Presser| February 2, 2018

If it wasn’t clear to some observers before, President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday should have made plain the meaning of his 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring, but the efforts of his administration might just as well be understood as “Making America America Again.”

 Put slightly differently, what Trump is actually doing, on a much grander (greater?) scale, is what the late Antonin Scalia did for constitutional law and our legal system. Scalia sought to return constitutional law to a traditional, simpler understanding, where judges eschewed the temptation to refashion the rules of law to fit with trendy cultural notions, and left changes in the actual law to the American people themselves. Scalia’s guiding star was the sovereignty of the American people and this is also what motivates our president. Just as Scalia was, at bottom, a traditionalist, so is Donald Trump. Scalia influenced scores of professors, judges and lawyers, but Trump is after something more—the actual restoration of traditional American culture.