Daniel Henninger, the usually perceptive deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, says he's stumped when it comes to President Trump's “thoughts on sovereignty.”
“I have no fully graspable idea what he is talking about,” writes Henninger in a recent column on the president's more than 20 references to the concept of sovereignty in his speech last month to the U.N. General Assembly.
Henninger allows that he understands the necessity of protecting a sovereign nation's “national security and economic interests.” President Trump, however, “seems to be talking about something more transcendent.” Henninger suggests the concept of “sovereignty as a mystical force” is “an idea brought into the Trump presidency by [former adviser] Steve Bannon and articulated… by [chief speechwriter] Stephen Miller.”
As a matter of fact, the concept of sovereignty as an overarching principle of the American republic originated not with Bannon and Miller, but with James Madison, John Adams, and the American Founders.
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