Austin Sarat ScheerPost
When I grew up, the school day always started the same way, with children standing hands over their hearts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. We said in unison, “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Anyone who showed a sign of irreverence or a flippant attitude during the pledge was subject to justice that was as severe as it was swift. I can only wonder how my teachers would have reacted to the moment at this month’s Republican Convention when President Trump, having finished speaking about election integrity, asked his audience to raise their hands and recite a different pledge of allegiance.
The pledge he offered was offensive, un-American, and also deeply revealing of the peril that America faces. It is just another wake-up call and a reason why record numbers of voters should go to the polls in November and deliver a decisive rebuke to the president and his party.
“Please raise your right hand,” the president demanded of a crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it anyway — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do. I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3, or we are going to vote before that.”
After losing his way for a minute, the president asked the people at the convention to “finish the pledge.” “We swear that on November 3rd we are going to go out and vote…so help me God.”
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols suggests that at that point, even Trump “may have realized that asking people to involve the Almighty in a promise to go to the polls was a bit much, and so he quickly pivoted to joking that if you don’t vote, you go to hell, and as a president who cares, he doesn’t want that for anyone. The prospect of ending up in perdition for not voting,” Nichols added, “isn’t exactly a knee-slapper, but lightening the moment allowed Trump to end the cringe and move on.”
A pledge to a single person and to “cheat like hell,” how’s that for a sign of Trump’s vision of America? The Founding Fathers must be turned over in their graves.
At the time of the American Revolution, pledging loyalty to a single figure was very much in vogue. British subjects were expected to take the following oath: “I do sincerely promise & Swear, that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty King George the third; and Him will defend to the utmost of my power against all Traiterous Conspiracies and attempts whatsoever which shall be made against his person, Crown or Dignity; and I will do my Utmost Endeavor to disclose and make known to His Majesty & his Successors, all Treasons, and Traiterous Conspiracies, which I shall Know to be against, or any of them. So help me God!
Recall that soon after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Alexander Hamilton renounced his allegiance to the British King. But he did more than that.
“I do swear,” Hamilton said, “that I will to the utmost of my power, support, maintain and defend the said United States, against the said King George the Third, his heirs and successors and his or their abettors, assistants and adherents, and will serve the said United States in the office of Aide De Camp which I now hold, with fidelity, according to the best of my skill and understanding.”
However, as the historian and writer Evan Andrews explains, “The idea of a verbal vow to the American flag first gained traction in 1885, when a Civil War veteran named Colonel George Balch devised a version that read: ‘We give our heads and our hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag.’”
That version did not last long. Seven years later, Francis Bellmay, who “worked for a magazine called The Youth’s Companion, was enlisted to write a new pledge for use in patriotic celebrations surrounding the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The magazine partnered with schools to encourage flag ceremonies and sold American flags as part of the initiative.”
The new pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” This version of the pledge has been altered several times.
In 1923, Andrews argues, delegates to the first National Flag Conference “substituted the words ‘the flag of the United States’ for ‘my flag.’” The Veterans of Foreign Wars explain that “The change was made because it was thought that the foreign-born might have in mind the flag of their native land when they said ‘my flag.”
A year later, the second National Flag Conference added the words “of America” after the “United States,” and, in 1942, as Andrews observes, Congress “officially adopted the pledge and decreed that it should be recited while holding the right hand over the heart.”
Congress added “under God” during the Cold War, with the support of President Dwight Eisenhower.
Along the way, the Supreme Court decided several cases challenging schools’ policies requiring students to recite the pledge, ruling first in 1940 that doing so did not violate the religious liberty of Jehovah’s Witnesses, before changing its mind in 1943.
Other courts have found that “the pledge didn’t violate students’ rights because they can choose not to participate.”
The University of Indiana’s Center on Representative Government contends that the key phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance is the reference to the “republic.” When we take the pledge, we are, the center notes, committing ourselves to a system in which “power is being dispersed across a large number of people and institutions. We’re talking about a system that was designed by people who were so wary of concentrated power that they made it difficult for any one person or institution to wield it.”
This brings us back to what Trump did.
He seemed not to have prepared his pledge, making it up on the spot. But as he did so, he was not focused on the country or its Republican form of government, but rather on himself.
Moreover, in its description of Trump as the greatest president ever, it exemplified the president’s self-aggrandizing preoccupations. Why wait for the historians to render their verdict? Anyone can do that.
As president, Trump acts as if he were imbued with superpowers, able to rename bodies of water and buildings and rebrand the nation’s currency with a stroke of the pen. If he can do that, why can’t he also brand himself “the greatest president in the history of the United States” and authorize the exercise of this extraordinary prerogative because of how much he loves his people?
If there was spontaneity in Trump’s decision to ask delegates in Dallas to raise their hands and pledge, there was also the bold, heretical gesture of a president urging his listeners to “swear to God” that they will “cheat like hell” if that is necessary to protect and consolidate his power. It wasn’t enough for the president to just urge his supporters to remember to vote. Anyone can do that.
In the fall of 2023, General Mark Milley used his farewell address as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to remind us that in this country, “We don’t take an oath to a king, a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America…”
Seems positively old-fashioned. Perhaps, but maybe Miley was also looking to a future when presidents won’t be demanding loyalty oaths from their subordinates in government or from the people they serve.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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