A Memo on My Idea of America Trump protests, polarization, and why being an American is complicated

I was walking my four-mile route, down the converted rail trail to Sonofabitch Hill and back up through a subdivision toward home. It was a typical summer day in the middle of the continent: bright sun, temperature in the mid-90s, humidity intolerable, and no-see-ums biting so mercilessly they set off a histamine reaction. Just as I passed that one house with all the aggressive political signs in the yard and the longest Ford pickup I have ever seen at the curb, a child across the street started playing “Ode to Joy” on a harmonica, badly.

In a flash like epiphany, a question presented itself: Who or what gave me my idea of America?

Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be in relation to their country, and their expectations for treatment by the government and fellow citizens. If enough people talk about their overlapping models, you might get political parties, widespread patriotism, rebellion, nationalism, or talk of a zeitgeist.

Our models, forged in childhood, surely create a political version of attachment styles that determine how we feel and behave as citizens later in life. “We are in a toxic relationship with the government who is trying to control our lives,” said Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) in a House hearing on June 26, after noting she believed many of the women present had previously been in abusive relationships.

Many Americans now feel their internal models of the United States not only do not resemble the current reality but also are under direct attack. “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” they say on social media, sounding like jilted partners.

Those on the left blame this on an unserious but ruthless administration and its enablers, while the right blames the left for trying to ruin their deep satisfaction at changes that would align with their long-held desires. This disconnect is so great it has split the psyche of the body politic, not to mention friendships and families.

In a podcast project on YouTube/Instagram, called The Necessary Conversation (“Family therapy through politics”) a man asks his parents political and cultural questions on Zoom. Sometimes he is joined remotely by someone who is apparently his grown sister. Questions are designed to reveal the parents’ radicalization by MAGA, so they get right to the point: Should US soldiers or Marines be allowed to shoot American civilians for protesting?

The parents are uninhibited enough to get right to honest answers: Yes, they say, agreeing that they mean even their own daughter, whom dad commands (not out of caring) to “stay home and shut your pie hole.” (The order to shoot civilians, mom says, would be given on the basis of “our freedom.”)

In another of the short videos, the man asks his parents if they would care about Trump voters in California losing their homes, if Trump did shut off federal disaster aid to score points for unrelated policy demands. Dad refuses to let mom speak and pronounces, after some waffling, “No, I don’t give a…rat’s-ass shit about anybody that lives in California, including you.”

Real conversations held in good faith might help us understand, together, if our beliefs are genuinely held. They might give us a chance to convince someone they are being cruel or hypocritical. But real conversations across viewpoints are rarer now, and in the age of social media it is hard to say that the instant, multitudinous, global airing of “beliefs” has led to greater peace, love, and understanding.

It is painful beyond belief to think that the center may not hold in the United States, that mere autocracy might be loosed, that “American” might come to refer mostly to landmass of origin, its boundaries drawn by fiat. As I picked up the pace to get home, I started questioning my internal model of America again, which is to say the bases for my expectations of what should be happening here.

Protestors put work into their outfits and signs at the rally at Daley Plaza. (Photo by John Griswold)

•  •  •

A friend who grew up in New Jersey was in the first grade during the Bicentennial. He still enthuses about what he calls “the entire culture of the East Coast” then. His parents painted the walls of his bedroom red, white, and blue, and he had Revolutionary War soldiers on the wall, Revolutionary War sheets on his bed, and fake colonial currency jingling in his pocket. (He still owns both posters and coins.) They chose Williamsburg to visit as a family and all loved it.

The patriotism of 1976, he says, did not feel forced or jingoistic. It was the opposite of today’s Three Percenterism, which co-opts the Revolution for far-right ideology. He remembers everyone admiring the history of fighting for a common cause and how it seemed they thought the US took that spirit into the world, where we were the standard bearers for freedom and democracy, not spreaders of doctrine or the ones forcing others to conform.

He was seven years old then, so he might be forgiven for not juxtaposing all that with the fall of Saigon the year before, Watergate, Cambodia, Kent State, and other events in his child-lifetime. The Bicentennial was his thing, a data point in his model, and he is entitled to it still.

As an adult, though, he knows we have to inspect and meditate on those memories as a responsibility of citizenship. We agree the country should respect itself enough to elect a president who can lead with (at least somewhat) complex understandings of race, class, gender, the law, war, the new economy, the environment, and revolutionary technology, without being frozen by neurosis. A president who expected to rule instead, ignorantly and by childish whims, would just be silly in any American model.

•  •  •

What did I come up revisiting my own? Childhood memories I think of as uniquely American run in every direction. Older parents who had lived through the Depression and WWII, and a sense of the communal—union country, CCC-built state parks and lakes, a National Forest, federal prison, National Wildlife Refuge. Picking up trash with the Sierra Club in the back of a National Guard truck on “state roads.” Public schools, public libraries, state-funded museums, and volunteer living-history sites. Food stamps for a bit and government cheese once, army service as legacy, small public airports, state universities.

If I had to choose a single image, it would be my friends and me, probably age seven, playing together on a sandbar in the Mississippi River, where my mother took us sometimes. We built sandcastles, soaked in the brown water, admired fishermen, then ran up the hill to climb an old steam locomotive left there by the Central Illinois Public Service. Later we would eat fried chicken dinner served “family style” at Ma Hale’s, a small country restaurant of a kind hardly ever seen now, which is a shame.

These memories of family, friends, the massive river, and the rugged land of Southern Illinois—which I did not leave until I was 19—have been put to good use all my life, since I could hitch them to later-learned complexities: George Rogers Clark, the Trail of Tears, Twain, Lincoln, the Civil War, the Underground Railroad and the “reverse” Underground Railroad, salt, coal, labor violence, industry, economic collapse, the New Deal, all the localized versions of historical, political, and economic events that are part to the American whole.

Yes, my foundational memories of America are of a certain landscape, but one inhabited and shared in a specific way. Even I am surprised at the things I did not find in my memories: ostentation, the corporate, lack of community, the belief that technology would create Eden, a basic hatred of education.

We all carry private, jumbled, personally-significant models, but where do they overlap publicly in this moment? Is there any longer a Platonic ideal of the United States? Was there ever one that held up against the violence we also spun out? I think so; consider the existence of a figure such as Thurgood Marshall, in the courts and civil rights movement.

Counter-protestor at Dearborn and Madison, in Chicago, on No Kings day. (Photo by John Griswold)

•  •  •

I thought about covering the parade in Washington, DC, for the US Army’s 250^th birthday on June 14. The anniversary was a genuine milestone, and I served in the regular army for four of those years, which meant 1/62 of the celebration was for me, sort of. Progressive activists hoped media would not feed Trump’s narcissism—the parade was also on his 79^th birthday—and the trip would have been personally expensive, but the deciding factor against my going was one of the emails I got from Army Public Affairs with my press pass.

“The 250th Army Birthday Festival is made possible through the support of 22 sponsors. This includes presenting sponsors General Dynamics and USAA, and festival entertainment sponsor the Gary Sinise Foundation. Platinum sponsors include the Wounded Warrior Project, the Army & Air Force Exchange Service, the Association of the United States Army, Bell Textron, Wal-Mart, GOVX, Leonardo DRS, RTX Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Leidos and BAE Systems. Gold sponsors include Armed Forces Mutual, Boeing, First Command, General Electric Aerospace, T-Mobile, King George, InterContinental Hotels Group and the NFL. Sponsorship does not imply U.S. Army or federal endorsement.”

Ew.

An alternative (and purposeful distraction) was the nationwide No Kings protests, planned for the same day as the parade by Indivisible, “a progressive grassroots movement of millions of activists across every state, fueled by a partnership between thousands of autonomous local Indivisible groups and a national staff [that] offers strategic leadership, movement coordination, and support to Indivisible activists, and also directly lobbies congress, builds partnerships, runs media campaigns, and develops advocacy strategies. Together we fight to defeat the rightwing takeover of American government and build an inclusive democracy.”

I had attended three similar 50501 rallies in downstate Illinois in recent months, looking for the flashpoint that many feared, just a few weeks into Trump’s second term. Chicago’s No Kings rally promised to be exponentially bigger, not only because of the size of the city and the economic strength of the state, but also because Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and President Trump had had several well-reported dustups, and their gamesmanship escalated before the rally.

In the days before it was to take place, Chicago administrators and organizers worried that special ICE teams were being pre-staged in the city as a provocation, since there had already been spontaneous protests in Chicago against nationwide immigrant arrests and deportations. No Kings was generally an “anti-Trump” movement but was centered on the topic of immigration.

(“As ICE raids escalate and Trump doubles down on authoritarian tactics—including politicizing the military—we’re meeting the moment with action,” Indivisible said on their website, while stressing, even demanding, nonviolent protest, as did 50501 and the ACLU, who were also involved.)

Trump had threatened to deploy state National Guard forces more widely than just in California, if given a chance to claim insurrection-level unrest. Two days before the protest, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul signed an amicus brief, with representatives of 21 other states, “opposing Trump’s military deployment in California” as a hedge against him commandeering the Illinois Guard.

Later The Guardian would report that, nationwide, No Kings was “among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history,” with perhaps four to six million people in attendance. “This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women’s March to rally against Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric,” they said. By comparison, half a million people heard Dr. King deliver his “I have a dream” speech in person in 1963.

Chicago police later estimated attendance at the Chicago rally at 20,000. Indivisible said aerial photos showed 75,000; I think that was closer. I stood for hours at the center of it, on Daley Plaza, where the crowd admired each other’s homemade protest signs, listened to popular protest music from a DJ, and enjoyed the fine, cool day by the Lake. After several speakers had their say, the crowd moved agonizingly slowly toward surrounding streets to march through the city.

The only real point of contention I witnessed was when a portion of the crowd turned, a little, on speaker Dick Durbin, number two US Senate Democrat, from Illinois, by chanting, “Do your job.” Durbin, who is 80, had recently announced he would retire from the Senate after six terms, but not before he voted in March for a Republican stopgap spending bill. “Durbin drew criticism from progressive groups, who used the words ‘profoundly disappointed’ and ‘cowardice’ in calling out his vote,” Politico said.

Being a Boomer and maybe feeling a little froggy at the prospect of having his life back, Durbin taunted the crowd from the safety of the stage: “You do your job.” There were some boos and more chanting, especially since it seemed as if protestors were doing their job in calling him out, but it was all civil enough for him to finish without even raising his voice.

Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling told Newsweek, “What I saw from the start…was a bunch of people that came out here to exercise their first amendment right. They were very peaceful, very complimentary of the officers.”

I saw marchers shout and wave a sign that said, “Nazi punks fuck off,” in the general direction of Chicago bicycle police guarding the intersection of Dearborn and Madison, but it was never clear the sentiment was directed at them, and both sides seemed mildly amused at the situation. A young counter-protester with a bullhorn and a “Trump is my president” shirt stood there too, preaching not about draconian policies on which he was keen, but about American evangelical Hellfire Jesus, who has always confused me. There it is, I thought. Models of mind, faced with others, choosing to co-exist on the streets of an American city.

Nationwide, at some 2,100 sites, there was little violence. Protestors in Los Angeles clashed with police, which had been occurring for a week. In Culpepper, Virginia, a man “intentionally accelerated his vehicle into the dispersing crowd, striking at least one person,” but the police had no reports of injuries. In Salt Lake City a man apparently showed up to the rally with an assault rifle, was confronted by a member of the rally’s “peacekeeping team,” and was shot. A bystander was killed in the volley. No one has been charged for anything to date.

What was really at stake in the protests, however, was what constitutes violence by the administration, even beyond masked mystery men grabbing people roughly on the street for detainment and deportation, without due process. (At least six people have died in ICE custody since Trump took office.)

James Greenberg, a Senior Research Professor in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and a Professor of Anthropology at University of Arizona, explained recently on Facebook the seriousness of the violence in what I would call societal asset-stripping.

“What links [the administration’s] moves is not chaos, but coherence. Degrade the commons, discredit public institutions, and redirect the flow of value toward private interests. This wasn’t the dismantling of the state [but] the weaponization of its infrastructure for dispossession,” Greenberg wrote.

“But the logic of dispossession goes deeper than land and money. It erodes time, possibility, and the basic scaffolding of democratic life. Under Trump [t]hese weren’t isolated failures. They were deliberate efforts to fracture the systems that sustain social reproduction and civic belonging. […] What was once called primitive accumulation—the seizure of land, labor, and resources in the formation of early capitalism—now plays out inside the borders of established democracies. It no longer requires conquest abroad. It cannibalizes institutions at home. The tools are legal, bureaucratic, and digital. The violence is slower, but no less real.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) speaks to the crowd at Daley Plaza, June 14, 2025. He will not run for office again. (Photo by John Griswold)

•  •  •

At an earlier 50501 rally I met a young guy, Chester Lampwick (not his name), who laid out his argument for me that the first violent conflict in the second Trump administration could happen on the campus of the University of Illinois. He thought it would start as a culture war fight (and proxy with Pritzker and his blue state) over DEI programs at the university. Fueled by ideology and conservative anti-intellectualism, state funding would be threatened, the university would be forced to send international students home, and programs would be forced out of existence. He outlined a potential scenario with violence among protesting students, Illinois MAGAs, the governor-loyal state police, and a federalized National Guard. (That scenario has not happened, but international students’ visas were revoked by the Trump administration. This decision was reversed, but threats still hang over the school.)

Chester, who grew up downstate—everything below Chicago, at the tippy-top of the tall state, is downstate—was also at the No Kings rally in Chicago with two friends. They never got close enough in the crowd to hear what speakers were saying, and they lost patience with the march.

Chester texted me to say they were now installed at Miller’s Pub, a Chicago landmark on Wabash under the El tracks near the Art Institute, and I should head over. Miller’s was founded in 1935 by Jewish brothers and bought by Greek-American brothers who turned it into the sort of American institution where “on any night of the week an average couple out on-the-town might find Marilyn Monroe or Mayor Daley in the booth next to them. Chicago baseball legends Bill Veeck and Harry Caray were regular customers [and] Jimmy Durante never came to town without stopping by for some figs & cream….”

The crowd on this day was mostly from the rally. People were happy and convivial in their triple-community of Chicago, dark-wood barroom, and activism. Chester ordered appetizers and drinks, as well as one house special, which he wanted everyone to try because it sounded so old-school American: liver, bacon, and onions, with mashed potatoes and carrots.

A Marine veteran joins the protest with his dogs, who give him many opportunities to speak with passersby. (Photo by John Griswold)

The four of us chatted about our lives and the world and what we hoped would happen in both. I asked Chester about his version of an internal model that set him up as an American. He considered.

“I guess what sticks out to me is that I was the kid from near the Illinois state capital who was taught to love Lincoln, but at the same time—not in any political way, which makes it more dangerous—simultaneously fed a kind of Lost Cause sense of nobility or honor.

“I was obsessed with the Civil War and was gifted a Confederate child soldier’s uniform one year. The skeleton in my closet is this fucking kid’s uniform and the Stars and Bars,” the flag of the Confederate States of America.

“Meanwhile I was watching all those Disney-history bullshit movies, those revisionist pseudo-historical dramas like Johnny Shiloh, about a Union drummer boy facing down Johnny Reb—and we’re supposed to respect both of them. And that series about the Swamp Fox [Francis Marion], so there was something put into me about underdogs, which is also how the Lost Cause is presented, and why guerrilla war appealed to me as a kid.”

He laughs. “Johnny Tremain: ‘Do you know what it means to tar and feather somebody? The Sons of Liberty are running around doing it.’

“So I grow up in the Land of Lincoln with respect for the Confederacy and watched Gettysburg, which Ted Turner produced as a miniseries for TNT, over and over. I watched it all the time; it has Tom Berenger and Jeff Daniels in it, and Martin Sheen doing Robert E. Lee like he did President Jed Bartlet in The West Wing, with just a glint of Apocalypse Now Willard—a little insane, Lee getting convinced of his own mission-from-God quality.”

The food was brought from the kitchen and handed to the bartender, an aging woman who waved the plates at us from behind the bar to come get them. We all tried the liver and onions, wanting to honor its historical authenticity and of-the-people humility. Three of us hated it, including Chester, but he chewed at it diligently until it was gone so as not to waste it, the greater evil. When he was done he made the noise Sllluuurrp, imitating the Depression-era hobo on The Simpsons who loves his liver and onions and, when he hits it big, says, “I’m not greedy. As long as I’ve got my health, my millions of dollars, my [solid] gold house, and my rocket car, I don’t need anything else.” Something in me recognizes the Americanness of that instantly.