The prospect of Donald Trump running for President again is at first glance astonishing. January 6, 2020 was an insurrection aiming at the overthrow of the Constitutional Republic itself. It is as if, in the wake of the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold was campaigning for President while running on the Loyalist vote. Or Jefferson Davis running in the post-Reconstruction Era on a ‘keep the blacks in their place’ platform, and being greeted with acclaim in Northern cites experiencing the first waves of the Great Migration. It truly seems like the US has lost the plot. But has it? Historian Gerald Horne suggests that ‘Patriotism’ in the US is foundationally treasonous. Detailing the history of illicit commercial transactions by Britain’s North American colonists with their Empire’s rivals in the decades preceding the Revolution, Horne says:

“The traditional narrative of the republic’s founding has emphasized insufficiently the amorality and trans-border ethos that came to define capitalism—which often was at odds with traditional notions of patriotism and even sovereignty.” Horne, The counter-revolution of 1776: slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America (2014: 18)

If anything, the armed forces seem to be a repository of “traditional notions of patriotism and sovereignty”. But is this still the case? Has the emergence of the now post-Cold War military industrial complex set in motion such dynamics of corruption that the high command can no longer be counted on? Has the diffusion of Christian Zionist and Evangelical anti-Enlightenment beliefs in the ranks—as in the political class—fatally undermined any commitment to the “traditional notions of patriotism and sovereignty” upon which the Republic is ostensibly founded? A second Trump presidency, if it comes about, will be the moment of truth.