‘But they wouldn’t really do that, would they?’ Yes. Yes, they would.
I’ve never really struggled reconciling my American patriotism with my idealism before.
Perhaps it’s just a function of how I grew up. Despite arguing politics with classmates in the conservative corner of Southern California I finished high school in, often being mocked for being the lone “liberal” in a classroom of white kids parroting conservative talking points, I was still the son of a military intelligence officer and the grandson of a helicopter door gunner. Serving this country, even with all its imperfections, was never a negative in my mind.
Like any nation, like any group of people, we’re a mix of good and evil, altruism and selfishness, honor and dishonor.
Yes, this country — like many others — was created through the sinful subjugation of a preexisting population. Yes, it has perpetrated great crimes, including very recent ones such as the torture of Iraqis, illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and the funding of genocide in Palestine.
But it’s also been the source of some of the greatest scientific achievements humankind has ever accomplished. It’s the place where millions of immigrants, including my own family, have come for a better life, and often achieved it. It’s a nation that was instrumental in defeating evil regimes 80 years ago and, for all the faults of the modern era, ushered in an age that has been far more stable and far less deadly than any in human history. In just the last few decades, this country has been responsible for saving millions of lives through the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development. It’s something that, to me at least, has always striven to do better than it did the day before, to learn from its mistakes, to become a more perfect union. I always believed that.
So I carried on loving this country, perhaps the same way you might love a romantic partner who you can admit is flawed and gets on your nerves and pisses you off at times, but is ultimately still yours.
As we approach this Independence Day, though, it’s become much harder to see the good as the second Trump administration has unfolded, taking a sledgehammer to science, lighting ablaze the foreign aid that could save as many as 14 million lives in coming years, funding gangs of masked goons to target anyone with brown skin in a Home Depot parking lot.
And even beyond being difficult to be proud of, it’s become legitimately scary. Arresting elected officials and suggesting opposition candidates be stripped of their citizenship moves far past the line of political mudslinging and deep into fascist authoritarianism.
There is, of course, no legitimate legal basis for raising the question that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani might be an illegal immigrant or that he should be deported. But these things don’t matter anymore. We are not living in a rational era any longer.
The other day, discussing the news surrounding Trump’s statements about Mamdani with a friend, he asked incredulously: “But could they really take away his citizenship?”
Of course they can. Who is stopping them?
Something we all must understand is that we no longer live in a country where our government respects the rule of law. Some would say we never did, though I think that’s misguided. The rule of law, being a design of humans, has always been flawed, doling out punishment to those who don’t deserve it, letting off scot-free those who do. But never in the modern era, even including Richard Nixon’s administration, has there been such an air of utter lawlessness in the White House. George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Joe Biden all, at minimum, respected court orders.
Donald Trump has proven he does not give one single fuck what any judge tells him to do, or what ink on a page might insist is his duty. He already perpetrated an attempted coup to hold onto power in 2021, and got away with through a combination of luck, the ineptitude of the Biden administration, and Trump’s own ability to jedi mind-trick his supporters into believing January 6 was a false-flag operation, or blown out of proportion, or something that never happened at all.
If Trump or his administration wants to do something, it will be done, no matter how theoretically illegal.
We do not live in a place where the process will protect anyone. We now live in a place where power — the raw, unfiltered kind that can only be perceived through the barrel of a gun — is what rules the day. And unfortunately, the Democrats lost the election in 2024. The only ones with that power are in the Trump administration. And they have no qualms using that power. No one is safe now. Not you, not me, not naturalized citizens, not people born here, not people who follow the rules. No one.
Consider what the reaction of Trump’s base might be if he were to direct ICE agents to arrest Mamdani and bring him before a judge for denaturalization proceedings based on fabricated charges of concealing “terrorist sympathies” when he became a citizen in 2018. Do you think they’d be outraged? Do you think they’d see it as an example of executive overreach, of big government corruption, of the nanny state gone too far?
Of course they wouldn’t. They think Mamdani is a dangerous communist and a suspicious brown-skinned interloper. They would cheer the removal of who they see as an unAmerican foreign intruder.
And let’s say we all take to the streets in protest of that action. Surely Trump’s supporters would insist their president respect our right to free assembly, to dissent peacefully against our government, right?
Of course not. Images of the sorts of isolated acts of physical resistance that take place at the fringes of any largely peaceful protest movement, pumped vigorously into the eyes of millions through Fox News and Newsmax, would be all the justification needed to roll tanks down Fifth Avenue.
But of course our patriotic fellow Americans would never tolerate the use of force against their countrymen for exercising their constitutional rights, no?
Wrong. They will cheer as their false messiah orders the masses of leftist agitators and foreign sympathizers be gunned down in the name of liberating the burnt-out war-torn dystopias they believe these cities, the ones they only perceive through television screens, to be. American blood will run through the Hudson River and people who see themselves as patriots will argue it was an unfortunate but necessary act required for ridding their country of traitors.
Maybe the same way you might finally realize your romantic partner has become unrecognizable, someone you fear instead of love, it seems this country has turned into a far darker version of itself than I previously thought possible.
God help us all.