Opinion | The Founders Would Gag at Today’s Republicans

George Washington made clear it was otherwise in a letter to a Jewish congregation in 1790 celebrating religious tolerance and diversity. “The citizens of the United States have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy,” he wrote.

Jefferson expressed a similar feeling, touting a homeland for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

So, quick summary: Republicans of today would not approve of the First Amendment as written. They would give Big Government free rein to quash dissenting voices in the press, and would prefer a merging of church and state.

Another founder, the immigrant Alexander Hamilton, would get the boot from Trump’s Republicans. He distrusted populists who disdain the rule of law, so there’s no place for him, a due process enthusiast, among the “lock her up” crowd. And he believed that immigrants were a source of greatness and renewal — a sentiment still shared by a majority of Americans.

But as they have picked up Trump’s hatreds as their own, Republicans have turned a cold shoulder to the wretched masses yearning to breathe free. Less than 40 percent of Republicans, in three recent polls, now believe immigrants are a benefit to the country. This could be because of ignorance: Even though the vast majority, 77 percent, of immigrants in this country are legal, a plurality of Republicans believe they are not.

Trump has compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, which is like comparing a noxious weed to a redwood tree. When the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party was at its height in the 1850s, Lincoln had this to say: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” He continued, “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’”

The modern-day Know-Nothings are the pink-faced mobs calling for a wall at Trump rallies. They are the architects of a government policy that puts children in filthy cages and forces them to drink fetid water, that sees helpless and newly orphaned babies as subhuman — all while laughing at the cruelty.