As far as the question of whether Trump is judging people by national origin or by each person’s individual characteristics, beliefs, and skills, goes, see this:

In other words, he was silent on what I was referring to: exactly what happened. What did Trump say? What did Graham hear? All of that is another game of telephone (Scott said what Graham said to him?) and generic statements (Trump knows what he thinks? That’s nice; how about if WE know).

you forgot this

Courtship becomes ” sexual assault”

Shitholes become “violence-ravaged and impoverished disaster zone.”

Illegal aliens/immigrants become “undocumented.”

Freedom of speech becomes “hate speech.”

Freedom of association becomes “bigoted.”

There are others, but those will suffice.

If you cannot quite place the name, you will have heard the singer and the songs.

From a live performance where she sings slightly off-key, Dreams. The studio versions are of course available too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVXng3sSxLE

“That’s a Conservative line. (Snarl.) That’s what *they* are saying. It sounds like something he would say, and *we* know what he meant…” is what I was told angrily by a liberal acquaintance. (Whoops,)

“But aren’t refugees fleeing shithole countries? Why else are they fleeing? It’s not like there are Norwegian refugees fleeing the happy, wealthy country of Norway.”

“It was racist,” “when did that term become racist?” “we know what he meant..” And so forth.

Oh I agree, but funny you never hear the words 2nd world country!

Of course in today’s world just those words would be a triggering micro-aggression showing the existing patriarchy of the US

“Nation of Ideas vs Nation of People is the central philosophical issue, though if he said it in the White House it probably raised the discourse well above Trump’s head.”

The trouble with that “philosophical issue”, is that it is just elevated sounding philosophical and logical nonsense ginned up for polemical/political purposes. Nonsense which hypostatizes abstract notions, and then substitutes them for concrete people.

But take away the people and there is no crowd.

“Nation”, then, becomes a kind of deracinated religious ideal committed to paper, to which actual persons are presumed to pledge allegiance.

The real “Nation”, which is the historical equivalent of a people, becomes the equivalent of “the Kiwanis” of some crap like that.

My considered opinion is that this kind of “nation” talk largely developed after the Civil War, when it became apparent that we were in no way, “one nation” in the traditional sense; but rather social and life-way enemies inhabiting the same landmass. The ideologues of the time needed something “common” to appeal to. So they appealed to a commitment to supposedly shared ideas, as the sign of “membership” in the “nation”.

But the clash of ideals is precisely what most notably characterizes the current state of this polity: a clash between the submoral collectivists, or “species beings” as Marx would have it; and the edified, who have classically liberal intellectual and emotional preferences.

Manju and I for example, no more share ideals, than Stalin and Jefferson did: and therefore the assertion that we are members of one “nation” in some philosophical sense, or that “Nation” can stand for some objective reference in a polity wherein antithetical ideals are continually at war, is as absurd as Manju’s “philosophical issue” contention.

We inhabit the same polity, but are not of one nation, even under his “philosophical” definition.

The remarkable thing about modern liberal hypocrisy on this question, is that they are now prone to making all kinds of noises suggesting that genetic inheritances define political preferences [which will obviously vary within so-called “racial” populations] , and that political preferences are merely rationalizations of innate biological coping strategies.

Thus, the clowns of the left eventually arrive back at the very point they claim they have superseded.

The only thing they manage to salvage is the point that there are undoubtedly some libertarian, natural-law leaning, quasi Aristotelians and virtue ethicists among any number of racial groups.

The fact that the United States is not solely composed of such persons, whatever their nominal race, just proves that the idea of a proposition nation, as applied to this polity in particular, is nonsense.