Your July 4th emotional life

**Brian Lehrer** (0:05)
From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Monday, July 6th.
Well, the country's 250th birthday party is over. How are you actually feeling?
How are you actually feeling? As you thought about the United States of America on Saturday, while you were whatever, barbecuing or at the beach or watching fireworks or whatever you were doing. We hope to have very constructive dialogues here in a series we'll call America 251, because for all the competing views of history and the present, as the big round number anniversary was approaching, Saturday was not the end of history, right? Our complicated times in this country continue. Let's start year 251 by playing some clips of President Donald Trump and Mayor Zeran Mamdani's July 3rd speeches. Also, a clip from Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude and an Andrew Cuomo clip from when he was governor that might very much surprise you. So here we go. I'm going to start with the Eddie Glaude clip, in which he does not sugarcoat his feelings. This is from June 15th on PBS, as the Princeton historian and professor was discussing his new book, America USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. Obviously, that was published in the context of the big anniversary now. The context here further is that he opens the book, first words in the book, opens the book with the words, I do not love America and never have. I do not love America and never have. And he explains why he started that way.

**Eddie Glaude** (1:49)
I wanted to differentiate myself from James Baldwin. I'm starting from a different place. Baldwin begins with his love of country and says, from there, I can criticize the country perpetually. I want to begin with wound.
So I'm really asking the question, how can you expect me to love the country given the reality of my experience and the experience of race in the country?

**Brian Lehrer** (2:12)
I do not love America and never have. How do you expect me to love the country given the reality of my experience and the experience of race in the country, Eddie Glaude? And that clip was quite a contrast with President Trump, no surprise, who basically said in his July 3rd Mount Rushmore speech that loving the United States is mandatory, especially if you're an immigrant.

**Donald Trump** (2:39)
You do not have to be born here, but you do have to love what we have built. You must love our country. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth, and we are not going to let anyone take that away.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:58)
Trump there on July 3rd saying, you must love our country. And now a clip from Mayor Mamdani's July 3rd speech from what was once George Washington's desk, now at City Hall, also on the topic of loving America.

**Zeran Mamdani** (3:16)
There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain. Love it or leave it, they say.
But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time.
It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?

**Brian Lehrer** (3:49)
So Mayor Mamdani there.
Let's keep going with another contrasting pair of clips from Trump's and Mamdani's July 3rd speeches, this time on the topic of American exceptionalism. First, here's Trump.

**Donald Trump** (4:02)
Unlike societies based on class, plan, or tribe, we see every citizen as an individual equal under the law and equal under the eyes of the Lord.
In America, we speak English because that is the language of our founding and for a thousand years, that has been the language of freedom. An American always wants peace and order, but we will never shrink from danger or threat. We will always fight, fight, fight, and win, win, win. We got to do that. Because this is our culture, this is our character. Not every American is all of these things, but every American knows these are the traits that make our country exceptional and exceptional it is.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:58)
So, Trump there on American exceptionalism and now Mom Donnie on that.

**Zeran Mamdani** (5:03)
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel, the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too.