Why the U.S. is neither great nor good at the moment | Opinion
The United States of America is neither great nor good.
Not when its president invites to the White House a man running veritable torture camps in his country and tells the man to build more such prisons to house even more U.S. citizens there.
“Homegrown criminals next,” U.S. President Donald Trump told El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele after a Monday meeting in the Oval Office and after a unanimous Supreme Court had told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a Maryland man wrongly sent to an infamous gulag in El Salvador.
“I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places,” Trump casually said at the White House before doubling down on the Fox News Channel.
The United States of America should neither be considered great or good, not when its vice president takes to social media to all but proclaim due process rights are essentially an inconvenience that don’t matter in a country whose foundation is supposedly the rule of law.
After a commentator rightly pointed out Tuesday that “If someone’s really a bad hombre you can give them a trial and prove it,” Vice President J.D. Vance tweeted back, “You are hiding behind ‘due process’ while ignoring that your actual solution means the ratification of a Biden border crisis that was rejected at the ballot box.”
Trump officials are imitating the George W. Bush officials who tried to silence those opposed to the Iraq war by calling them unpatriotic Americans siding with terrorists. Today, everyone opposing Trump are MS-13 and Hamas sympathizers, not people taking seriously democratic principles Trump officials are tossing out like yesterday’s trash.
The United States of America will not deserve — or earn — the designation of great or good as long as much of the American public sits on its hands while people are being snatched off the streets and the administration defies Supreme Court orders. Not when many reading these words may be more outraged that I dared to say we are neither great nor good than grieving why those labels don’t fit. This is particularly true given that though Trump’s approval rating has taken a big hit because of foolish tariffs, many Americans are still OK with his handling of immigration.
Democracy was on the ballot in November. Democracy lost. It will keep losing so long as many of us seem fine or disinterested with what’s happening. Because it’s not happening to us. Because they are “criminals” and “gang members.”
That’s what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the men, women and children they’ve been targeting since January, even at elementary schools, and even including a 24-year-old asylum seeker who was following the law while living in Davidson. It’s happening to college students and immigrants with visas and green cards, affecting family members of the undocumented.
During the campaign, Trump pretended he’d only go after “illegals” and violent criminals, despite using disgusting rhetoric about fellow human beings, including his demonization of immigrants legally in the country, falsely claiming they were eating their neighbors’ pets.
Many Trump supporters I spoke to at the time said they believed Trump, because they’d never support someone who’d harm or harass the innocent. They weren’t telling the truth. For if they were, they’d be on the front lines telling Trump to stop, demanding he put an end to these evils.
They’d say that they, too, see through the administration’s empty rhetoric about criminals.
Or they’d remember that they put in office a man convicted of 34 felonies in criminal court, and found liable in civil court for sexual abuse — or rape “under common modern parlance,” as a New York judge wrote — or that they elevated a man to the most powerful position on Earth despite his role in a violent insurrection. Trump has proclaimed innocent immigrants criminals, though “criminal” seems a label that fits him more snugly.
Until that happens, the United States will never really be great or good. Though we may have more wealth and riches than any other place on this planet, we are being revealed as morally and ethically bankrupt. No amount of money will be able to remove that stain — that shame.
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 11:45 AM with the headline "Why the U.S. is neither great nor good at the moment | Opinion."