Make America Great Again: American identity through its texts

Abstract

The interest on this topic comes from a personal experience. While I was living in Arkansas, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States. The recurrent slogan through his campaign, Make America Great Again, made me question what the true essence of the American identity is, as well as the foundations, goals and rights this country truly defends. In order to really find out what the American identity is, I will analyse different texts from the colonial times, such as John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity", "Letters from an American Farmer" by John de Crevecoeur, some texts written by the Founding Fathers as the "Declaration of Independence", and others. The final step in the present essay will be to connect these texts and ideas to Trump's discourse, in a comparative analysis centred on the "true" American identity. Hence, the ultimate goal of this essay is to analyse the "Make America Great Again" speech as a genuinely American product, trying to find out whether Trump's discourse shares some parallelism to the United States' founding documents