Identity, trauma, and our national memory: What it means to be American under Trump

There are times when the soul of a nation seems to rise to the surface of public life — raw, tangible, visible, and trembling with all the contradictions it contains. This, I believe, is such a time.

In moments like these, it’s tempting to look only at the immediate chaos: the sound bites, the indictments, the rallies, the fury. But the present is never just a spectacle to observe. It is a point on a line. And to understand the point, you must trace the line. Because history isn’t just what happened — it’s how we got here.

To be an American in the age of Donald Trump is to live with a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance. We are still a nation founded not on blood or soil, but on an idea — the Enlightenment faith that all men are created equal, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that liberty, if it is to endure, must be universal or it corrodes entirely.

And yet, we are also a people shaped by the enduring failure to live up to that idea. The novelist and historian Jim Cullen once wrote that America is best understood as “a country founded on a dream,” and the problem with dreams is that they’re easiest to admire from a distance. Up close, they expose the jagged gaps between our self-image and our behavior.

So let’s be very clear here: Trump did not invent the forces he channels. Rather, he revealed them — amplified them — gave them not just a name, but a face. He didn’t trigger a backlash against a particular policy; he gave shape to a deeper resentment against the direction of history itself.

Because American history, properly understood, is the story of a long, uneven struggle: the slow, hard wresting of political and cultural control away from a narrow founding class — white, Protestant, heterosexual men — and the gradual extension of the nation’s promise to those it once excluded. That extension has always been met with resistance. And Trumpism, in its essence, is not about economic grievance or national security. It is about cultural loss — about the haunting sense that the center no longer holds, and the story of “us” is being rewritten without permission.

In Trump’s America, the gravitational pull of resentment has gained a terrifying force. For some Americans, particularly those who once stood unchallenged at the center of national identity, the expanding inclusiveness of the last 50 years has felt like dispossession. And Trump offered them something powerful in return — not a coherent policy platform, but an emotional refuge. He took the complex reality of demographic change and recast it as betrayal.

Take, for example, Trump’s executive order ending diversity training in federal agencies. On its surface, it was a technocratic move. But symbolically, it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the modern, inclusive state. Trainings that sought to explore concepts like white privilege or structural bias were rebranded as “divisive,” “un-American,” even “psychological abuse.” Trump was not just opposing these sessions on policy grounds — he was asserting that white Americans should never be made to feel uncomfortable in the story of their own country.

It was a gesture that said: You are not the problem. You are the victims. It transformed the language of racial reckoning into a language of humiliation. It turned education into grievance, and history into an indictment of the present. And for millions of Americans, it offered a psychic balm: a defense against the encroaching reality that the world was changing — and not necessarily in their image.

Or take Trump’s immigration policy — especially the rhetoric that framed Latin American migrants not as desperate human beings, but as a swarm of invaders. “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” With those words in 2015, Trump began the campaign not only for political power, but for cultural restoration. The border wall he proposed was never just a structure; it was a monument to anxiety. A defense not against physical threat, but against the perceived dilution of a dominant cultural identity.

Family separations. Travel bans. Threats to end birthright citizenship. The immigration agenda was, at its core, a line drawn between “us” and “them” — between a once-homogeneous imagined past and a frighteningly plural future. For many Trump supporters, illegal immigration became a cipher for a deeper, more existential fear: that their language, customs, religion, and, yes, race no longer guaranteed centrality in American life.

And here is the great tragedy: America is perhaps the only nation in the world not built on ethnicity. Our shared identity is not born of common ancestry or tribal origin. It is built instead on self-governing principles — expansive, open-ended, and intentionally universal. The point of America is that it stands only for these principles. All attempts to define us more restrictively — by bloodline, by culture, by race — are not merely misguided. They are dangerous.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: It is easy to wax enthusiastic about a pluralistic democracy in the abstract. It is much harder to live with it in practice. Diversity stretches civic trust. It introduces friction, competing narratives, and conflicting truths. The Declaration of Independence is a soaring document, but are its generic principles — life, liberty, equality — really strong enough to bind a nation as diverse and divided as ours?

The abolitionists, the suffragists, the Freedom Riders, the Dreamers — they did not despair when the dream failed them. They demanded that we try again.

Can a people held together only by an idea withstand the constant centrifugal forces of identity, memory, and trauma?

That is the question of our time. And it is what makes this era so disorienting. Trumpism is not merely a departure from democratic norms. It is a retreat from the American ideal itself. It imagines the nation not as a moral project, but as cultural property — a patrimony under siege. It substitutes cruelty for character. It transforms nostalgia into rage. It weaponizes grievance into gospel, and normalizes rage and revenge.

And yet, there is hope in the reckoning. Because America, at its best, renews itself through its contradictions. Our history is not a steady march toward justice, but a halting, stumbling pursuit of it. The abolitionists, the suffragists, the Freedom Riders, the Dreamers — they did not despair when the dream failed them. They demanded that we try again. That we be who we said we would be.

To be American in the era of Trump is to choose, again, which story we believe we are part of. Are we the guardians of a mythic past — or are we the authors of a living idea, one that demands more of us with every generation?

The answer will determine whether the arc of history continues to bend — however unevenly — toward justice, or whether it collapses under the weight of its own unfulfilled promise.

Jack Hill is a diversity consultant, child advocate, journalist, and writer.