We like to imagine that Donald Trump is an aberration, a break from who we are. But what if he is not the exception? What if he is America unmasked? From Salem to Jamestown, from slavery to Jim Crow, from the Cold War to Gaza, our nation has wrapped exploitation in the language of liberty. Trump simply stripped the disguise away. This essay traces that hidden history, names the power that has defined us, and celebrates the bottom-up movements of love that have always carried the hope of something better.
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The Whole Story
Earlier this week I saw a friend post online, “This isn’t who we are. This isn’t America.” They were talking about Trump. About his language, his cruelty, his open talk about vengeance in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The way he uses government to both attack those who disagree with him and enrich himself. How he does it all while calling blatant lies truth under the blessing of a Christ-free Christian Nationalism.
And here’s the irony. At some level, that is why people support him. Not because he is cruel, deceptive, or corrupt, but because he is open about it. He says the quiet part out loud. He names corruption where others pretend righteousness. He points out that politicians and elites cover their betrayals with masks of innocence, while he wears no mask at all.
That does not make him truthful. Trump lies as easily as he breathes. But it does make him undisguised. He embodies the corruption that has always been part of America, only without apology or pretense. Where past leaders cloaked exploitation in the language of liberty, Trump parades it openly.
Which is why I call him the most American of presidents. Not because he represents our highest ideals, but because he is the unmasked version of what we have so often been. He is the revelation of our history without its propaganda.
I don’t say this because I hate America or think we all need to be ashamed of being Americans, rather it’s because I believe something within us knows this is true and shame keeps the mask on. Acknowledging our shared history but knowing it doesn’t have to define our future is the way forward.
American Empire
So as an act of honesty, let’s walk through our shared history, stripped of the pretense.
Salem, Jamestown, and Liberty
While it was the second outpost established in the new world, let’s begin with Salem, largely because that’s the first story we tell when we talk about our founding. We like to say the colonists came for religious freedom. And it is partly true. They fled persecution in Europe, hoping for a community where they could worship as they chose. But freedom for themselves quickly blurred into control over others. Soon they were branding women and outsiders as witches, silencing them with the rope. The same colony that celebrated freedom became a colony of conformity. Already, we see a toxic vision of American’s God emerging, a God who sanctifies domination and calls it holy.
And that story of the “first Thanksgiving,” the one we learn in Kindergarten, it’s been radically whitewashed. Yes the Wampanoag people sat at that meal, a meal only made possible because the indigenous Americans had taught the colonists how to survive, but it was all largely a strategic move because up to 90% of their population had died as a result of European diseases introduced by early explorers. What we tell as harmony was really a fragile truce before centuries of betrayal, dislocation, and life on reservations.
But before there was Salem, there was Jamestown. While Salem clung to a righteous mask, Jamestown made no attempt to hide. It was a corporate venture of the Virginia Company, designed to make investors rich. Colonists came not for liberty but for profit. They seized land, enslaved Native people, and used violence as currency. If Salem represents America’s moral pretense, Jamestown represents America’s naked exploitation. And those two visions merged. Righteousness to cover profit. A moral story to justify an economic conquest. That merger has defined America ever since, or at least until Trump.
Our Founding Fathers formally wove this reality into our nations story. When it was time for revolution, they used the language of liberty. “Give me liberty or give me death.” “All men are created equal.” But liberty was narrowly defined. Enslaved Africans were not included. Native people were not included. Women were not included. Many of the men who signed the Declaration owned human beings. The Revolution birthed a dream of freedom, but it was a freedom built on exclusion. The moral story covered the conquest once again.
The South
The same reality is seen in the Confederacy. When the South seceded, they were not subtle. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said in 1861: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of equality]… its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Slavery was not a side issue. It was the foundation, and not just because it enable the South’s economy. Only after the South lost did the story change. Suddenly the war had been about “states’ rights.” The moral story was rewritten to cover the same economic and racial conquest.
And let’s be clear about the North. While true abolitionists risked everything, many Northerners opposed slavery because it undercut white labor. Racism in the North was quieter, more polite, but no less real. In more recent times, Justice Clarence Thomas has pointed to the difference as key in his personal formation. In the South, racism was in your face. In the North, it was delivered with a smile. Same poison, different packaging.
After the Civil War, there was a window of hope as the reformed nation stepped into Reconstruction. Black Americans voted, built schools, and held office. But white terror struck back. The Ku Klux Klan lynched, burned, and killed. And when white Northerners grew weary, they pulled their armies out. Not because the South was safe for Black Americans, but because the cost was too high. Justice collapsed into Jim Crow. America chose white reconciliation over Black freedom. Again, the moral story was rewritten.
The Industrial Revolution
A few decades later, America lead the Industrial Revolution. While we celebrate the Rockerfellers and Carnegies as national heroes, models of how to go from rags to riches, their wealth came through exploitation on a massive scale. Immigrants died blasting railroads through mountains. Children worked long days in mills. Strikes were crushed with clubs and bullets. The Gilded Age glittered for the few while the many were crushed beneath. Like liberty in previous generations, the story of progress was told to cover the truth of conquest.
WWII and Beyond
When we tell the story of World War II, America casts itself as the savior of Europe. We stormed the beaches at Normandy, we liberated the camps, we defeated fascism. The truth is more complicated. The Eastern Front consumed the Nazi war machine. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people, nearly 20 percent of its population. Their sacrifice broke Hitler’s army, but our story rarely names that truth. At home, the war supercharged the American economy and entrenched the military-industrial complex. Factories that once made cars churned out tanks and bombers, and after the war they never really slowed down. The machine found new enemies to keep itself alive.
Out of that moment came the Cold War. Communism was framed as an existential threat, spreading like a contagion across the globe. Sometimes that fear was rooted in reality, as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, although if you ask the Soviets, that was more about a buffer zone to guard a devastated homeland after centuries of invasion.
In Korea, we replaced one empire with two. Japan was driven out, the Soviets oversaw the North, and in the South the United States simply stepped into Japan’s imperial shoes, backing elites against the people. In Vietnam, the justification was the “domino theory.” We were told that if one country fell to communism, others would follow like dominos. But it was never about freedom. It was about feeding the military industrial complex and global control. Napalm fell on villages while leaders spoke of liberty. Once again, the moral story covered the conquest.
In other places, the “Red Scare” was pure projection. In 1953, the United States overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, because he dared to nationalize their oil industry, a move that would cost Western corporations billions. We replaced him with the Shah, who tortured his own people with the support of our weapons and our dollars. That intervention still shapes Iran’s posture in the world today, all because we prioritized profit over peace. A similar story holds true in Central and South America, be it Cuba, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, or Honduras.
A Flicker of Hope Snuffed Out
At home, the G.I. Bill is remembered as a moment of great uplift. And for many white veterans, it was. They bought homes, went to college, built wealth for their families. But Black veterans were excluded. Banks refused their loans. Schools closed their doors. Neighborhoods were redlined. The law looked neutral, but its application was poisoned. A reimagined vision of the American Dream was subsidized for some and stolen from others.
But the blessing for white America would be short-lived. By the 1970s, elites began organizing to dismantle even the modest gains of the New Deal order. The Powell Memo, written by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, became a blueprint for corporate America to defend its power. It called on business leaders to build think tanks, fund media outlets, lobby aggressively, and reshape education in order to secure their dominance. The story they sold was seductive: if we do what is right for business, prosperity will trickle down to everyone. Once again, a moral story was told. There was a promise of shared prosperity through the market.
Reagan did not invent this agenda, but he baptized it in the language of freedom and wrote it into national policy. What followed was the shredding of unions, the gutting of public programs, and a massive upward transfer of wealth. The trickle-down dream never arrived, yet the myth endured. And when the Cold War ended, the war machine did not slow. America’s leaders simply found new stories to keep it running.
The War on Terror
The War on Terror became the next chapter in the same book. We were told it was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were told it was about hunting bin Laden, even though the Taliban offered to hand him over weeks into the conflict. We were told it was about girls finally going to school in Afghanistan. Each story sounded noble, but each one was a cover. Twenty years later, the Taliban was stronger, more sophisticated, and wealthier than ever. The generals retired to boardrooms, the contractors lined their pockets, and Afghan families buried their children beneath the rubble of liberty promised but never delivered.
Israel
And how can we talk about the history of America without talking about our relationship with Israel? Since 1948, American foreign policy has been tethered to Israel. At first it was about securing a Cold War ally, but over time it became something closer to theology. Christian Zionism and the myth of divine destiny sanctified American money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Billions flowed year after year, ensuring not only Israel’s security but also enabling occupation, settlement expansion, and the displacement of Palestinians.
Now that legacy is written in the ruins of Gaza. American weapons and American vetoes at the United Nations have helped make possible the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of children, and what human rights groups have named as genocide. And just as Salem baptized control in God’s name, so too does this alliance wrap violence in scripture. Gaza shows us again how America’s toxic God blesses power, calls conquest holy, and leaves love trampled under rubble.
Again and again, America has preached freedom while training death squads, funding dictators, and punishing nations who chose their own path. The story is consistent. The moral mask covers the machinery of power. This is America’s story. Righteousness to cover profit. Morality to cover exploitation. Freedom to cover exclusion. Trump is not the exception. He is the mask empire uses to justify itself pulled away.
America Beyond Empire
And yet, in the midst of all this, there is another story, another thread, one woven not from the top down but from the bottom up. These are the stories of Americans, both profound individuals and collections of people who have insisted that humanity is more than conquest, more than profit, more than power. Their voices have always been marginalized because they do not serve the interests of empire. They have been silenced, jailed, and killed because they are the way of love, not the way of power. Yet their witness keeps breaking through.
Songs of True Freedom
In a nation that built its economy on slavery, abolitionists were voices crying in the wilderness. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth. They spoke when it was dangerous to speak. They escaped chains only to return and free others. They published newspapers that were burned, held meetings that were attacked, and lived with constant threats. The powers of their day called them agitators, but history names them prophets. Their courage insisted that human beings could not be property, and their legacy echoes still.
During the Gilded Age and the Industrial Revolution, when robber barons grew rich on child labor and crushed strikes with clubs, ordinary workers banded together. They formed unions, walked out of mines, and shut down factories. They were met with hired thugs, National Guard troops, and bullets. Yet their persistence birthed the eight hour workday, the weekend, and the basic safety standards we take for granted. These victories were not gifts from the powerful. They were won by people who had nothing but each other and the conviction that their lives mattered.
The New Deal did not spring fully formed from Franklin Roosevelt’s imagination. It was wrestled from him by militant labor strikes, marches of the unemployed, and coalitions of socialists, communists, and organizers. Roosevelt himself admitted as much. When activists came to him with demands, he told them, “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now go out and make me do it.” The programs we remember as the New Deal were not gifts from above. They were concessions to the relentless pressure of people from below who refused to starve quietly.
For generations, women were told their place was silent, their role was submission. Yet suffragists marched, picketed, and went to prison. Some endured force feeding when they went on hunger strikes. They were mocked as unnatural, unfeminine, and unworthy. But their defiance cracked the façade of male domination. Their persistence carved out the right to vote and reshaped the landscape of American society.
When segregation was law and lynching was terror, ordinary Black citizens rose up. They marched across bridges, sat at lunch counters, and faced dogs and fire hoses. Their leaders were jailed, beaten, and assassinated. The powers called them criminals and radicals. Yet their insistence on dignity shook the nation’s conscience. The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the end of Jim Crow were not granted by benevolent leaders. They were wrenched from power by people who refused to bow.
In the fields of California, César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and thousands of farmworkers marched for dignity. They organized boycotts of grapes and lettuce, refusing to let America ignore the hands that fed it. Their strikes were met with violence. Yet through nonviolent resistance they won contracts, raised wages, and gave voice to a labor force long kept invisible. Their legacy reminds us that food is not just a commodity. It is grown by human beings who deserve dignity.
The pattern continued. Antiwar protesters in the 1960s exposed the lies of Vietnam and turned public opinion against an unwinnable war. The Queer community, long criminalized and brutalized, rose up at Stonewall and sparked a movement that demanded dignity. Environmental activists exposed poisons in rivers, fought for clean air, and created the momentum that birthed the EPA. Each of these movements was resisted by those in power. Each was dismissed as fringe, radical, or dangerous. Yet each revealed that real progress in America has always been won by people who chose solidarity over silence.
This is the way of love. Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Harriet Tubman risked her life again and again because she believed her people’s humanity was worth more than her own safety. Susan B. Anthony insisted, “No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.” Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” César Chávez reminded us, “The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.” Each of these voices was dismissed as radical in their time, yet each revealed what it looks like to live the way of love.
The Chorus Continues
And the chorus has not gone silent. Today Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” bell hooks wrote that “the moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.” Wendell Berry calls us back to the ground itself: “The earth is what we all have in common.” Chris Smalls organized workers at Amazon, one of the most powerful corporations on earth, proving that solidarity can break through even the tightest corporate control. Kshama Sawant built Workers Strike Back and showed that ordinary people can stand up to billionaires in city politics and win. Nina Turner’s, We Are Somebody, continues to remind us that both political parties have bowed to power, and that only a people’s movement can bend America toward justice. You even have Butch Ware running for governor of California, using that states unique primary laws to give a third party candidate a fighting chance and reminding us along the way that if a state with one of the largest economies in the world can be re-oriented to work for the people not just the powerful, then the entire system can be changed.
These voices remind us that love is not a soft sentiment. It is the most disruptive force we know. Love breaks chains, tears down walls, and unmasks lies. The way of love is not sentimental or naïve. It is gritty and costly. It is solidarity, vulnerability, and communion. It insists that every human being has dignity and that our flourishing is bound together.
Power vs. Love
You have heard me describe two different ways of being in the world throughout this story. One is the way that has so often defined America as a nation, the way of domination, conquest, and control. The other is the way that has marked the very best of Americans, those who rose from below and insisted that humanity is more than exploitation.
I have come to name these two paths the way of power and the way of love, a distinction I first learned from Catholic contemplative Henri Nouwen. Power, Nouwen wrote, is the “taking form of existence.” It grasps, dominates, and controls. Love, by contrast, is the “forgiving form of existence.” It yields, shares, and restores. Nouwen gave me the language, but he was not alone in identifying the framework. Across traditions we find the same truth. In Buddhism, compassion breaks the chains of control. In Sufi Islam, love is the path to union with the Divine. In the Hebrew prophets, justice is the deepest form of worship. Again and again, humanity is faced with this choice: the way of power or the way of love.
Which brings us back to Donald Trump. When we say he is the most American of presidents, it is because he stripped away the disguise. He operates by power without apology and without pretense. There is no sheep’s clothing for Trump. He is simply the wolf. And yet the danger is not Trump alone. Trump is a symptom of the larger disease. To imagine that the answer is simply to put team blue back in charge is to put the sheep’s clothing back on the wolf. It is to cover power once more in a mask of righteousness.
Team Blue is Power Too
Why do I say this? Bill Clinton tore apart the social safety net with so-called welfare reform. He signed the crime bill that supercharged mass incarceration. And he pushed NAFTA, which gutted American manufacturing and sent jobs overseas.
Obama campaigned on hope and change, but he bailed out banks while abandoning homeowners. He expanded drone wars, oversaw record deportations, and paved the way for today’s tech oligarchs with an open door to mergers and consolidation.
Biden gave political cover and weapons to Israel, enabling a genocide in Gaza. At home, he cut off the lifelines that had sustained families during COVID, leaving many worse off financially than they were under Trump. At the same time, he invested in long-term projects like the CHIPS Act, Build Back Better, antitrust efforts under Lina Khan and Jonathan Cantor, but he never told the story. He destroyed people’s present, failed to articulate their future, and set the stage for Trump’s return. Predictably, Trump has undone much of the future good Biden had set in motion.
Team Love
So what we need is not another round of team red versus team blue. That game only ensures that power continues to rule while convincing us we are choosing sides. What we need is what has always saved us. The bottom-up pressure of ordinary people who refuse to bow. Not only on Election Day, but in the ordinary days in between.
In the past week, we’ve seen Jimmy Kimmel knocked off the air and put back on because of public pressure. Imagine if we went to battle for things far more important than a comedian who made a name for himself by inviting girls to jump on trampolines.
Envision workplaces where people organize. See neighborhoods where mutual aid networks care for each other. Create communities where alternative economies begin to grow under the cracks of the old one.
Because love is not simply a vote. Love is a way of being. It is solidarity in action, the daily refusal to live by domination, even when the culture insists there is no other way.
So this is more than team red or team blue. It is team love. And it is embodied every day we choose dignity over exploitation, solidarity over silence, humanity over power. It is the only way we can stay human.
Practices To Move From Propaganda to Honesty
Truth-telling, be it about our nation or ourselves can get uncomfortable. At the root of it, is shame. Whether it’s because we think there’s something unlovable about us or we’ve actually done something to be ashamed of and we’re trying to hide it, shame tells us to put on the mask.
Embrace on the other hand, invites us to take it off. Individually, that means coming to the realization that nothing can take away our inherent worthiness. As a nation it means knowing that who we’ve been doesn’t mean that’s who we always have to be (notice South Africa, a nation once defined by apartheid was one of the first to nations to highlight Israel’s apartheid regime).
So this week, I am offering three practices to help you move towards a life of honesty over propaganda. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.