One sign that Donald Trump may be losing his grip on the political movement he galvanized is that an answer seems to be emerging to the often-asked question of what Trumpism without Trump would look like.

International media outlets, including the Financial Times and the Guardian, have recently described the next stages of Trumpism as “America First,” while senior figures from Trump’s administration, including Larry Kudlow, Rick Perry and Kellyanne Conway, have set up the America First Policy Institute, a think tank promising to define post-Trump Republican policy. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA online academy was aimed at parents who wanted an “America-first education” for their children, while former Trump aide Stephen Miller has founded America First Legal, which is fighting the Biden administration primarily over immigration policy.

The Los Angeles Times considered the flip side: “Can ‘America First’ exist without Trump?” a headline wondered. The answer is yes, it can, and has for a long time. “America First” is paradoxically both one of the oldest and most durable codes in American politics and one of the most overlooked. Perhaps we forget it for a reason.

Phrases like the “American Dream” and the “melting pot” are commonly used today to describe ideas about American identity and inclusivity, but it’s “America First” that has been more closely associated with debates about inclusivity generally and immigration specifically — and for much longer.

The “American Dream,” for example, first appeared in American political conversations at the turn of the 20th century, to argue against the divisiveness created by wealth inequality. Among the earliest uses of the phrase I’ve found was in a nationally syndicated article in 1900 called “Rich Men and Democracy,” arguing that every republic in history was endangered not by disgruntled ordinary citizens but by “discontented multi-millionaires,” because they are “very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality.” Submitting to wealthy elites’ divisive demands for special privileges would mark “the end of the American dream,” because that dream was one of democratic parity and equality of opportunity.

By contrast, “America First” emerged much earlier — aptly enough, during the original nativist movement of the 1850s, when the Native American or American Party (nicknamed the Know Nothings) formed to defend what its members considered the nation’s “real” Protestant culture from the threat of immigrant Catholicism.

“America First” has stoked divisions, not healed them, from the start, even if its advocates like to claim otherwise, as when the conservative columnist Michael Barone announced in 2017 that “‘America First’ is not a threat but a promise,” predicting that “a healthy nationalism based on ‘America first’ points toward a less polarized, more inclusive country.” Four years later, Trump voters were waving “AF” flags as they sacked the Capitol to overturn an election they lost: so much for the “healthy nationalism” of putting America first.

The simple truth is that there have always been as many resisting American unity as advocating for it, from the fights in the Constitutional Congress to the Civil War, from supporters of regional sectionalism instead of post-bellum reconciliation, to immigration restrictionists and racial segregationists. From one perspective, the history of the United States is one long battle over the limits of unity, with fights over inclusion and exclusion.

It’s telling that the novel we most closely associate with the American Dream, “The Great Gatsby,” never uses the phrase but is entirely about exclusivity and restriction. Its villain, Tom Buchanan, is a discontented multimillionaire whose arrogant entitlement destroys the dreams of the outsider Jay Gatsby, and Buchanan’s tirade as the novel opens is about the decline of civilization caused by America’s welcoming the wrong kind of people. “If we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged,” he insists, invoking popular nativist treatises of the early 1920s, which urged restricting immigration to safeguard the quality of American “racial stock.” And that debate was all but synonymous with the slogan “America First.”

In fact, Tom Buchanan would have been an ardent America Firster (a snob of the first order, he would have despised Donald Trump but voted for his policies while sharing his ignorance, malice, racism, avarice, arrogance and entitlement). Popular memory, as captured by Wikipedia, currently credits Woodrow Wilson with coining the phrase “America First” during his 1916 presidential campaign. Wilson certainly popularized it, in a 1915 speech urging native-born Americans to view hyphenate immigrant Americans with suspicion and to demand of naturalized citizens: “Is it America first, or is it not?” But he didn’t originate it.

At an 1855 “American convention” held in Philadelphia, the American Party adopted a platform that would have sweepingly denied political and civil rights to immigrants. Speaking during a downpour, a nativist politician from New York told the crowd, to cheers: “American as I am, I decidedly prefer this rain to the reign of Roman Catholicism in this country . . . I, as an American citizen, prefer this rain or any other rain to the reign of foreignism . . . I go for America first, last and always.”

“America first, last and always” may sound simply patriotic, but since the 1850s it has consistently invoked nativist restrictionism and economic protectionism, and often urged isolationism. It has often accompanied anti-immigrant violence and conspiracy theories. In 1876, an anti-Catholic editorial called on every American “in this Centennial year, to renew the declaration of independence, to declare himself and the nation free, as it ought to be, from the thraldom of every foreign power — whether England or Rome — and to begin again where our forefathers began, with America first, last and always.”

During the latter decades of the 19th century a widespread belief developed that Britain supported free trade as part of a secret plot to thwart the growth of American industry; Republicans responded with a protectionist tariff and “America First.” Well before Wilson, in 1888, Benjamin Harrison promised home labor and protectionism under the “Republic Banner” of “America First, the World Afterwards!” in an election fought over tariff policy.

A domestic tourism campaign called “See America First” helped the phrase explode into popular culture in the first years of the 20th century; by 1916 “America First” was the slogan of both Wilson and his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. William Randolph Hearst blared “America First” across his newspaper chain as he fought to keep the United States out of World War I and the League of Nations, and to block the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, even as Warren G. Harding rode an isolationist and protectionist “America First” platform into the White House in 1920.

The phrase was invoked during the first Red Scare to defend against Bolshevism and on the floor of Congress to pass the raft of laws that imposed racial and ethnic quotas on immigration in the early decades of the 20th century, not to be lifted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. And it was a favorite slogan of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s was a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic, antilabor and red-baiting fraternity as well as a white-supremacist one. The point for all these groups was always the same: to defend “real America” against the threats posed by anyone they deemed less than a real American.

Nor were these ideas especially divisive a century ago. They were shared by the vast majority of native-born Americans. Even a phrase like the “melting pot” was just as likely to express restrictionism as inclusivity — and often joined forces with “America First” to do so. Anti-immigration sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was justified primarily by eugenicist ideas of racial purity and the ethnic superiority of White Europeans over everyone else. These ideas drove the hostility and fear of Americans like Tom Buchanan: not an animus against immigration per se but against inferior racial “stock” coming to the United States and diluting the character and quality of American society.

The assimilationist message of the “melting pot,” an image popularized by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play of the same name, thus easily flipped into eugenicist warnings against “debased” ingredients from foreign nations entering the American mix. “Let the American melting-pot boil,” urged a 1917 Ohio editorial in typical terms, “just so it’s of the right quality, up to the proper standard of excellence. But all undesirable material should be denied importation,” the “dregs” rejected and “sent back across the seas.” From the melting pot America should extract only “the pure metal” and stamp into it “the image of Uncle Sam, and the motto: ‘America First, Last and All the Time.'”

Meanwhile, the “American Dream,” the phrase we probably associate most closely today with the idea of the United States as an inclusive land of opportunity for immigrants, was not popularized until 1931 and not used with any frequency to denote immigrant aspirationalism until the 1940s. This, too, is no coincidence, not least because of the degree to which Nazism and the Holocaust discredited eugenicist and fascist ideologies about racial superiority, even as the anti-fascist cause and the Cold War more securely tied American collective identity to doctrines of liberal democracy and inclusivity. These principles intersected with the civil rights struggle against exclusionary and white-supremacist definitions of American citizenship as a herrenvolk democracy.

The phrase “America First” fell rapidly into disrepute during World War II, largely because the America First Committee (whose most prominent spokesman was Charles Lindbergh) had urged non-intervention and appeasement and been accused of anti-semitism and fascist sympathies. It was then consigned to temporary obscurity, but not everyone forgot. The slogan was periodically recalled to articulate resurgent right-wing nationalism, often explicitly white nationalism, from Gerald L.K. Smith, once known as “America’s most notorious antisemite,” who founded the America First Party in the 1940s, to Barry Goldwater, hailed by his supporters as an “America First” politician and described by the conservative National Review in 1963 as standing for “States’ Rights, strict construction, limited government, private enterprise, and America first, last and always.” It was used to describe David Duke and George Wallace, before being resuscitated by Pat Buchanan (“We are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last and always,” he declared in 2000) in his presidential campaigns. A certain Donald Trump flirted with making his own run under Buchanan’s Reform Party banner, then brought the phrase triumphantly back a century after Wilson popularized it.

Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.”

These “America First” initiatives go beyond attempts at excluding the “alien” that were already divisive, and futile, a century ago. One of the most prominent spokesmen for “America First” today is Nicholas Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist who organized the America First Political Action Conference earlier this year. Fuentes was also present at the storming of the Capitol, as were his “Groyper” followers, waving his “AF” flags. Fuentes declared: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” That is certainly what “America First” has meant in the past, as its leaders promise that only they can put America first, by inflaming divisions against nearly every other human being. But it is “America First” that endures, not its erstwhile leaders — and its history offers a pretty good indication of what to expect from Trumpism without Trump.

Sarah Churchwell is the author of “Behold America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream.'” She is a professor of American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

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