This is America: Trumpism and the Threat to the American Spirit

By Meghana Pappu

Whenever somebody talks about their idea of the American spirit, I picture not glory, nor of wars fought in the name of freedom; I think back to when I was 13, or maybe 14, re-watching the Bollywood classic My name is Khan for my social science class, coming to the chilling realisation that this was the reality for a lot of Americans – not diamond-studded lives of luxury, but the brutal reality of being trapped in a gold-gilded cage, stuck in a system that doesn’t show anyone mercy – not even its own citizens.

I saw a nation that styled itself as a symphony of freedom, innovation, and moral clarity. But I also saw the silences: the civilian deaths in distant wars, the drone strikes without explanation, the border cages, the black and brown bodies brutalised in the streets.

In his April 6th piece, John Harris invites us to imagine the American soul as a song – one that is now being drowned out, he argues, by the cacophony of Trumpism. It’s a moving metaphor, but I wonder if we’re still listening to the same tune. Or perhaps, more pointedly, if it was ever the same tune we were all listening to in the first place.

When Harris speaks of a country whose music is under threat, I understand his grief. Trumpism, with its vulgarity and violence, its contempt for truth and celebration of cruelty, is more than bad governance. It is the static that drowns out the song Americans believed they were singing. It twists the chords of dignity and replaces them with a thumping, empty drumbeat of grievance.

Like Harris, I too grew up on American music; the likes of Green Day, Bruce Springsteen and CCR. I too want to believe in the America that once inspired, that once danced to the rhythm of possibility, invention, and community. I want to believe that even now – under the second coming of Donald Trump – the very essence of America remains intact. But for many of us watching from the outside, or from the margins within, America’s reality was always more elusive than its myth. What we’re seeing now is not the distortion of a great melody, but perhaps the uncomfortable truth that the melody itself was only tuned to some, meant to be unheard of by the rest.

"The soul of a country, like that of a person, is not measured by its perfection but by its capacity for self-correction."

I say this not as a cynic, but as someone who spent her youth watching the projection of America from afar – through films, music, politics, and policy. The America of jazz bars and 90s hip-hop was, for me, inseparable from the America of drones, sanctions, and the all-too-familiar language of intervention. 

We knew the songs, but we also knew the silence that followed them.

Harris sees in Trump a threat to the American soul – sees Trump as a man who cheapens its culture, degrades its institutions, and narrows its voice into something controlling, dominating. 

That’s all true.

What Trump did was to reveal something that many Americans, especially middle-class white and liberal Americans, have had the privilege of ignoring: that America’s spirit has never been invulnerable, nor universally shared. 

The disillusionment Harris describes is real, but it’s not new. For some Americans, the Trump era feels like a distortion of everything they believed their country stood for. For others – Black Americans, Indigenous communities, immigrants, and countless others who have felt out of step with the tales of American exceptionalism – it feels like confirmation, a painful unveiling of a truth they’ve known all along, that America’s soul, as sung in its anthems and op-eds, often had little to do with the realities on the ground. For them, disillusionment didn’t arrive in 2016, it arrived generations ago. 

What feels like collapse to some has long felt like reality to others. 

Still, there’s something mournful and touching in Harris’s yearning. He writes as someone who believes in what America could be, and fears what it’s becoming. That belief – in reinvention, in resilience, in the idea that the country could bend back toward justice – is part of the American identity itself, and he is right to ask: does Trump’s presidency – or rather, the political culture it has both shaped and been shaped by – represent a permanent fracture? Has the American ideal failed? Or is it, as Harris seems to hope, simply wounded, awaiting revival?

That depends on how we define “America.” Is it a land of constitutional ideals, or of lived experiences? Is it the grandeur of the Capitol, or the quiet labour of millions? Is it gospel and Springsteen, or the sound of protest in the streets?

To suggest, as Harris does, that the American song can be preserved simply by outlasting a president risks underestimating how deeply the rot has spread. Trump didn’t compose this moment alone. Twice now, tens of millions of Americans have voted for a man who boasts about assault, mocks the disabled, incites insurrection, and promises vengeance like a petty king. He is not a glitch in the system; he is a feature. And that forces us to confront the uncomfortable question: what if the America many of us believed in was never as widely shared as we thought?

I want to believe, as Harris does, that America will outlive this moment – that the loss of the American spirit he’s grieving is real and recoverable. But I also think that the spirit was never housed in the White House or in any one administration.

The soul of a country, like that of a person, is not measured by its perfection but by its capacity for self-correction. And here’s where I diverge slightly from Harris: I don’t believe America’s essence lies in a mythical golden age before Trump. 

It lives, rather, in people: in protestors marching through tear gas with nothing but hope in their throats; in teachers holding underfunded classrooms together; in the voices of Black poets and queer musicians, in immigrant mothers, in rural kids dreaming in faded baseball caps; it lies in the fight against forgetting, in the stubborn insistence, among teachers, organisers, artists, and yes, even disillusioned voters, that another kind of America is still possible.

The American soul is shaped not by presidents, but by citizens; by those who stay, who fight, who mourn, who love, and who refuse to let go of the idea that a nation can do better than its worst instincts.

We see it in the young voters organizing for climate justice, for reproductive rights, for racial equity; not just as policy demands, but as visions for the kind of country they want to inherit. We see it in the music, too; not just the old soul that Harris mourns, but in the emerging voices that speak with rage, with love, with defiant clarity. The soul of America is not dead. But it is being contested, every day, in classrooms, on picket lines, at ballot boxes, and in the small decisions of daily life.

What Trump has done is bring the contradictions of the American myth to the surface. He has made it impossible to ignore who gets to claim patriotism, who gets left behind, and who gets heard. He has forced a reckoning. And maybe, just maybe, that reckoning is what America needed. If that battle feels harder now, perhaps that is a sign not of failure, but of reckoning. Of a country finally confronting the contradictions it long buried beneath its anthems.

I want to end where Harris begins. Where he writes of music, I write of silence. The silence of children in refugee camps, the silence of young Black men in courtrooms, the silence of working-class Americans left behind by a system that promised them more. But from silence comes a different kind of sound: not the polished harmony of power, but the raw, aching, beautiful noise of people rising. 

If America is a song, then it is not a single, soaring melody. It is a discordant, multi-voiced, ever-changing jazz piece. There are moments of harmony, yes. But also discord, improvisation, even collapse. Trump may have hijacked the mic, but he hasn’t silenced the stage. The question is whether enough Americans, and enough of the rest of us, are willing to keep listening, and playing, until something better emerges.

I don’t think America’s soul is being destroyed. I think it’s being reimagined by those who were never allowed to write the chorus in the first place.

Image: Flickr