The President of Anti-America
by Matt McGuire
March 1, 2025
We have all heard politicians from both parties talk about America as a country not founded on ethnic or linguistic principles but upon an idea. From Joe Biden to Ronald Reagan, JFK to Richard Nixon, both Roosevelts, to both Bushes, it has been a shared & agreed upon stance across the political spectrum that our nation is based upon a shared idea of what America is & what America should stand for before the world…we are a country based on the ideals of “freedom, equality, and opportunity for all”. You know, those truths that our founding document claims are “self-evident”.
As many of the presidents mentioned above, and millions of citizens have pointed out, we have not always lived up to this founding idea. Still, we have always held it out as an example to ourselves and the world that ideas like this matter. We are, or in reality, we are trying to become, as FDR called it during WW2, the “arsenal of democracy”, or as Reagan spoke of it, quoting one of the Pilgrim leaders, “a shining city on a hill”, or, as Lincoln said, “the last great hope of earth”.
This idea, this “self-evident truth” regardless of how true it is or may have been in reality, had been shared across the political spectrum. It is our founding myth, just like the King Arthur story is for the British, or the days of 1789 are for the French.
Yesterday, in the Oval Office, and importantly, on television, Donald Trump and his henchman, JD Vance took our founding myth, threw it on the floor in front of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, and urinated on it.
If we needed more proof than the last 10 years have provided us, this should be it. What “MAGA” really means is “make America no longer America”. It means “strip away the ideal we have set for ourselves so we may have the America of the eternal war of all against all, shown to the world”. It means “I got mine, and the rest of you can pound sand”. It means fascism.
This should be the final alarm of an almost constant sequence of alarms that have been ringing since 2015.
Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the MAGA Republican Party are anti-American…not just in that they are the enemies of all we have always believed about ourselves, but that they are embracing the literal opposite of those things. If the ideals we claim to hold are a positively charged magnet, they are the negatively charged one. The two will never come together.
Even Ronald Reagan, the source of so much wrong in our nation, paid lip service to the words in our founding documents. Donald Trump and MAGA do not care about them at all. Donald Trump is the president of Anti-America…
If we believe at all in the words of our founding document, we must oppose the Anti-American president, and the rest of the MAGA acolytes now with every ounce of strength we have.
The great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, wrote, “Let America Be America Again” *
*https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147907/let-america-be-america-again Read the whole poem here.