Well, a stereotype myth can still have some truth to it; look at all the advances and creativity to come from America, and opportunity at it's best (which of course it won't be all the time). To much the individual or too little, neither is optimal.

The kind of person Rand could do some good for might be someone creative with low self-worth, but she was writing in reaction to a state that becomes a monstrous crushing thing when it's really also something invented by man, as money is an invention of ours too!

Ha! I bet that cartoon Ayn Rand comes with 'Kung-Fu Grip' action. tm (c) pat pend.

Well, you know, there were fine people at such old rallies.

There is an incredibly large difference between being proud of your country and identifying as a nationalist...and the President knows it and I suspect you do as well.

It's scary how unsubtle so much of Trump's whole approach is and that it keeps working on some people. Of course a big chink of it is made-up what he thinks this crowd in front of him wants to buy (and yet his promises not kept keep piling up, especially releasing his tax info), typical chameleon con man that and why states most familiar with him knew not to vote for him. What is real is his long-standing and provable racism. What clinched it for anyone who pays attention were those phony blacks are violent stats he re-tweeted three years or more ago... there is no motivation but sheer fear and hatred to put out bogus stats to incite hate against a group, plus they came from an alt-right website to top it all off. But people think a racist is some kind of one-note caricature so you can even find a few Black people and Hispanics 'for' him that know in their hearts he "can't be" a racist (and women who know nobody "loves" women more than him). The divide and conquer keeps working and he will keep targeting and keep selling the fear which comes at root from probably actually hating democracy and thinking patriots are fools with poor genes (remember the many deferments from service he got). They love to see those wrong lefties lose so much they will cut off their own noses and destroy their own, once conservative, party.

God help the U.S. right now what with the redistricting and voter ID tricks being played on top of all the internet and other divisive junk out there! Democracy is looking very thread-bare these days and the pay-off will only be for the extreme top class and their offspring who don't even know real working people often (strong meetings and golf dates are their idea of work). Nobody is fooled so well as someone wanting to buy into and believe the con at all costs, and they dig in deeper the further the rallies and the rhetoric go on.

They are using voter ID rule changes and added regulation (the people who usually brand every regulation as job killing) to disenfranchise Native Americans, out of state students, and the poor. If there is a typo, or even a comma changed on some newly acquired as demanded ID, the vote becomes a provisional vote only counted in a close situation in one state. People in poor counties wait in line for hours regularly and have polling stations closed where they should be increased based on numbers, get calls telling them of false polling station location changes based on their party registration on the rolls, there was even one guy recorded bragging how the changes in ID requirements were going to hand his state to the Republicans. All that kind of stuff should be considered un-American. Also anti-Democratic. They use stories of fraud that had barely been shown to exist anywhere to justify adding the amount of ID and kinds, sometimes very close to an election date, knowing poorer working people can't afford a lot of time off on top of the processing fees. The Voter Rights Act was said to no longer be needed, and practically from that point on there have been hundreds of illustrations that they were very much needed to be kept after all. Sometimes hard to find this real news among all the celebrity junk and talking head pundits though.

We all took high school civics right? How is this not understood?
Nationalism is a philosophy that places country above all else, no exceptions. That means nation before ethics, nation before personal freedoms and nation before moral principles and that kind of unswerving devotion to the state creates a dangerous individual attachment to those in power...which is the opposite of all the principles our nation was founded upon. 

We're not talking about some misunderstanding or something that's just thought to be a "code word" by some groups, this isn't "There are good people on both sides..."...this is saying he is a nationalist which has a very clear meaning and use and it isn't pretty.

Do I need to post some pictures of what prior proud nationalists looked like?

I think you know what those pictures would be of.