DJT’s Not The Only Problem. America Is.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Let me be straight up about something before we get into this: this is not a piece defending Donald Trump. I want to say that clearly, mostly because I’ve met the internet and I know how y’all get down. Also, for the global majority of people, none of what I’m saying is new. But, for those that need the reminder, here’s the statement plain and simple: Dems have spent the better part of a decade building our entire political identity around Trump as the villain of the American story. And in doing so, we continue to let America itself (the system) completely off the hook.

Chill. I’ll walk through what I mean by that, why I think Trump is actually the most American president (hopefully ever), and what the real conversation we should be having actually looks like.

So What Are We Actually Talking About?

Right now, there is a massive cultural industry — podcasts, cable news segments, yard signs, whole ass political campaigns (got my eye on you, Juliana Stratton) — built on the premise that if we can defeat Trump, we can get back to the America we love. The “take our country back” folks. TOCB v MAGA. And that sounds… great. It feels good to have a clear enemy, a specific target, a face to put on the problem.

And what we’ve collectively decided the problem isn’t, is America. Its history. Its original design. The machinery that was running long before that Orange Dirty Bastard ever existed. That’s a convenient decision. It is also, I’d argue, the reason we keep getting back to this bullshit.

The OG ideas for America were genuinely dope. I somehow mean that without irony. Liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness; these are ideals I, and this is true, f*ck with. The problem isn’t that we have ideals. The problem is that we’ve never had an honest national reckoning with who those ideals were originally written for, and what it would actually take to extend them the way we claim they already work for literally everyone who chooses (or was forced) to come here. And the reason it matters right now is that as long as we’re focused entirely on Trump — FYI Project 2025 is more than halfway implemented — we are still actively choosing to pass that history entirely. He’s going to die at some point, but unraveling this mess isn’t a task I think our current Donkeys in Blue are willing to do (c’mon Hakeem).

The question worth sitting with, especially when people say they want to “take the country back,” is: back to what, exactly? Back to before Trump? Sure. To which moment, though? Which administration, which era, which version of America were things working the way they’re supposed to for everyone?

The Perfect Villain Paradox

Here is what the “Trump is the problem” framework does really well: it gives us somewhere to put our frustration without requiring us to look too far inward.

It is significantly easier to say “Trump Sucks” than to say “it sucks that the richest country on Earth is a system that was designed, from the very beginning, to extend its promise to some people and violently withhold it from others, all while changing the rules to best serve the oppressor and chief.” The first one fits in a social media caption. The second one gets you side-eyed for talking too much.

And we are, as True Americans, very good at avoiding that conversation. What tends to happen is this: we vote someone out, or we wait for someone to leave, and then we brunch. Sometimes, we’ll even get a little uncomfortable and inconvenienced and have strongly worded protests rallies before Ubering back to our condos. We call it progress. We go back to whatever normal looked like before. And the same ZIP codes still determine your life expectancy. The same wealth still pools in the same places. The means of production and access stay controlled by billionaire pedophiles and whatever Kristi Noem’s husband got going on.

Where I Land On This

I’m not saying don’t vote. I’m not saying the work being done by the adults in the room doesn’t matter. The real work has always been in looking at this country not as the mythology we were forcefully sold, but as the mechanism it actually is: how it runs, who it serves, where the gaps are between what we say and what we do. That kind of examination isn’t unpatriotic. Read The 1619 Project or anything written by Dr. Jared Ball. It’s actually the only form of engagement serious enough to match the size of the problem.

Trump is America’s Mirror. It’s not broken either; it’s been staring back at us for 250 years (happy birthday, I guess). We’ve continued to see what we want to see. And right now, we are looking ugly as hell. Now is a good time to try on something new.