Conservatives have long complained that “I don’t recognize my country anymore.” In Trump’s America, though, it’s liberals who see something insufficiently, well, American. Issues once assumed to be settled — the desirability of racial tolerance, a general preference for democratic processes — now appear, suddenly and ominously, to be up for debate. For many, this has created a sense of rupture, a disconnect between what they had assumed would be happening at this moment in history and what is actually taking place — as if the 2016 election shifted the nation into some dystopian reality that was never meant to be.

This, at least, is the feeling reflected in the growing popularity of a word once used to browbeat liberals and leftists. Today’s White House, according to Trump’s critics, is not only wrongheaded or meanspirited but “un-American.”

“America is a nation of immigrants,” Bruce Springsteen declared from a stage in Australia in the wake of Trump’s first travel ban. “And we find this antidemocratic and fundamentally un-American.” When the White House introduced a revised version of the order earlier this month, the newly chosen Democratic National Committee chairman, Tom Perez, warned that “this ban on Muslims is just as dangerous and un-American as the last one.” Others have invoked the word to assail the president’s name-calling, attacks on judges and contempt for the media. “This White House does not seem to value an independent press,” CNN’s Jake Tapper declared last month. “There is a word for that line of thinking. The word is un-American.”

This line of attack remains just as popular on the right, and Trump staff members have been quick to use it. On the day after Trump’s speech to Congress, Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, called for unwavering support of the president’s initiatives on behalf of “immigration crime” victims: “If you object to that, you are in favor of pain, in favor of tragedy and in favor of chaos,” he told one interviewer, “and that is un-American.” The president himself has joined in, too. “The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy,” he tweeted in mid-February, responding to accusations about his campaign’s ties to Russia. “Very un-American!”