As President Calvin Coolidge said, “Once we have made this land our home, wherever our place of birth, whatever our race, we are all blended in one common country.” That was the idea of the American melting pot, which Democrats have turned into a boiling cauldron of identity politics and racial animosity. That’s why leftists (and too many on the Right) can’t view President Donald Trump’s comments about four congresswomen in any way except through a racial lens.

America is, in many ways, an idea more than it is a place, though it is arguably the one and only place on the planet built on such a solid foundation of Liberty. And an American tradition (for good or ill) is reminding people who don’t want to be here that they can leave at any time. (After all, we need a wall to keep people from illegally coming in, not, as in totalitarian socialist states, one to keep people from getting out.)

Democrats have a long history of not only issuing invitations to leave but of demonizing their opponents as foreign enemies, sometimes in the same sentence. “I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776,” President Franklin Roosevelt said of Republicans in 1932.

PowerLine’s Stephen Hayward quipped, “So Republicans should leave the country! FDR didn’t even invite them to come back after they had fixed their home country. Imagine if he had put that in a Tweet.”

By 1936, FDR was rebuking “the resolute enemy within our gates” — i.e., Republicans. And as Hayward writes, “By 1945 FDR was saying that a Republican return to power would represent a victory for the forces of fascism we were fighting against overseas.”

Today, FDR is (wrongly) revered by many Americans as one of our greatest presidents.

Hayward went on to note that because leftists are so conflicted about America itself, they don’t often charge their opponents with anti-Americanism. Instead, they take a cue from FDR and substitute “fascism” and “racism,” neither of which fits most of the subjects of their attacks. He lists myriad examples of Democrats pointing to Republicans and yelling “Hitler!” or “Nazi!” They “had Mein Kampf as their political bible,” said one Democrat. Another declared, “The smell of fascism has been in the air at this convention.” Both statements were way back in the 1960s.

In the decades since then, conservatives have been subjected to endless inflammatory Democrat rhetoric about Hitler, fascism, Nazis, genocide, concentration camps, putting people back chains, and the like — all while Democrats claim to want “civility” and “tolerance” of dissent.

So what’s new with Trump? He fights back like a Democrat, lobbing rhetorical bombs with abandon, even if he did have to distance himself from the “send her back” chant at his North Carolina rally, saying, “I was not happy with it. I disagree with it.” Democrats really hate him because he’s winning their game.

Closing thought: After having just endured “Pride Month,” in which all Americans must kiss the ring of the Rainbow Mafia, it occurs to us that, to the Left, the only unacceptable sort of pride is American pride. That, too, is why Democrats hate Trump. It’s not because he’s Hitler reincarnated. It’s because he loves America.