Trump Has Changed the Face America Presents to the World

WASHINGTON — For two decades, the United States presented an official face to the world that reflected the power and promise of a land of immigrants.

Madeleine K. Albright, Czech-born and the first woman to become secretary of state, arrived at Ellis Island in 1948. Colin L. Powell, the first Black man to be this country’s chief diplomat, is the son of Jamaican immigrants. Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush’s second secretary of state, grew up in segregated Alabama.

When Hillary Clinton succeeded Ms. Rice, State Department officials joked that the post was closed to the white men who had held a monopoly on the job for more than 200 years. But even the patrician John Kerry, Mrs. Clinton’s successor and President Barack Obama’s second secretary of state, was seen overseas as working for a man who represented a personification of the American dream to people around the world.

“A Luo man,” people in Mr. Obama’s father’s home country of Kenya marveled, “became president of America before one could become president of Kenya.”