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You've misread me. When I say "our enemies hate us because we're too cool" I am deriding the idea that Trump's domestic opponents dislike him because he is too American.
Regarding the TR quote:
If the observation is merely that you can only have one highest priority, it's not wrong, but that doesn't in any way resolve my point. Everyone has divided loyalties, and for relatively few of them is their highest loyalty to their country. Most people will prioritize personal connections over abstract group membership if push comes to shove. Many native-born people prioritize personal social/economic interests over the national interest or the well-being of their countrymen. Religious individuals will tend to prioritize their faith over their country. Despite this, not only does no one suggest you can't be a Christian and an American, but quite a few people think you must be a Christian to be a proper American. The special concern for hyphenated Americans is both historically unwarranted (both today and in TR's time) and a form of special pleading.
The idea of being a pure American is both incoherent and is itself quite un-American.
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No, I specifically don't say that. I am saying that many oikophobes think that (and also IME many Southerners also think that, which feeds into the sense of cultural cringe).
However, you then go on to vindicate my other points, e.g. Red Tribers (and Red Tribe-fetishizing Blue Tribe conservatives) conflating American culture with Red Tribe culture* while making questionable claims about the American Left. "MLK was an adulterer", for example, is something far more likely to be brought up by a resentful reactionary trying to tarnish the civil rights movement than a liberal (for whom MLK is pretty much a secular saint). You are mistaking a willingness to challenge sacred cows for a wholesale rejection**. As I mentioned in my other response, there are a lot of things liberals like and admire about the United States. They're just not necessarily the things conservatives like.
The American Right has developed an incredible difficulty with digesting any sort of critical perspective. The kindest theory I can offer up is that while liberals tend to be idealists whose interest in the US relates to values and principles while conservatives engage in a kind of ancestor worship. This creates a huge point of contention when liberals look at the past and note that America often fell short of its stated ideals and participated atrocities. Generally speaking, this is meant as an exhortation to live up to those ideals, not a nihilistic rejection of them. However, conservatives construe this as an attack on the honored ancestors, who are pure and beyond reproach. They might grudging agree that, e.g., the Native Americans got kind of a raw deal if you press them, but it's a passive-voice acknowledgement that refuses to implicate the settlers and cowboys they valorize and bringing the subject up is seen as kind of suspect.
While we're quoting dead presidents, let me throw in a favorite quote of my own:
This encapsulates the attitude that undergirds liberal reformism in the US. Crucially, it does not reject the past, but it does not hold it as sacred either.
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In a sense you're right, but in another, more important sense, you're quite mistaken. Bill Clinton had/has a lot of the same superficially 'low-class' behavior but is pretty widely liked by liberals. To steal a quote from the internet:
You can strike out European and Canadians and insert "liberal Americans". You're ascribing it to classism*** when the central issue for Trump's critics is that Donald Trump is a bad person and really, really bad at being President. He is bad at the performance of leadership (and it is a colossal mistake to confuse this for simply being 'low class'). He is bad at long term planning. He refuses to accept reality and treats bad news as a conspiracy against him. He is comically dishonest. He is openly sadistic. He is openly corrupt. I could go on naming Trump's vices for a long time, but the underlying point is this: he's exactly the kind of man liberals think shouldn't be president. Many of his inadequacies in the realm of competency and intellect would be tolerable if he was a basically decent guy, but then he wouldn't be Trump.
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* Of the items you list, the only ones that are convincing red-coded are cowboys, pick-up trucks, and John Wayne.
**obviously, you can find people who engage in that sort of wholesale rejection, but they are on the margins of the movement. Republicans love to highlight them, both because it is politically useful to highlight weirdos in the opposition and because they make them genuinely furious, but you end up with a situation where you're comparing social media personalities to, like, the President of the United States and his senior advisors.
***it should probably be noted that Trump is not so much low-class as classless. Inasmuch as there is a socio-economic class angle to liberal antipathy for Trump, it is Brahmin vs Merchant, not rich versus poor. Trump is, himself, a very rich man
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