Donald Trump doesn't know what it means to be an American
At 2:21 this afternoon, the White House press pool traveling with Donald Trump while he vacationed at his private golf club in Bedminster was told they would not be seeing the president today after all. Instead, they would be heading straight to the airport in Morristown, New Jersey, where they would wait for him to arrive before making their way back to the White House.
At 4:00 p.m., the president finally arrived at Morristown Airport aboard Marine One. As he walked across the tarmac toward Air Force One, he waved to the press gathered nearby and told them he had a “great” weekend and had “lots of meetings” while he was at Bedminster. He continued walking towards the plane, never stopping to talk to them, and ignoring the rest of the questions reporters shouted at him.
At 5:03 p.m., Trump stepped off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews. Once again, he ignored the press and immediately boarded Marine One. At 5:04 p.m., one minute after stepping off the plane, Donald Trump sent the post heard around the world:
It took him exactly one minute to get from the plane to that post. He walked off Air Force One, boarded Marine One, and within a single minute, from somewhere inside that helicopter, he shared a single message that told every remaining ally on earth exactly what American promises are worth with Donald Trump as our president.
He called Kim Jong Un “unthreatening and respectful.” North Korea has conducted twelve suspected ballistic missile tests in 2026 alone, including three in the last ten days, one on August 6 and another on August 12. He fired projectiles more than 700 kilometers across waters towards our allies. He chose the word “ unthreatening “ for a dictator who starves his own people. Kim Jong Un runs political prison camps that satellite imagery has documented for decades. He executes dissidents with anti-aircraft guns. He called him “respectful,” knowing that North Korea has threatened to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ and has tested a hydrogen bomb powerful enough to shake the earth beneath the feet of people living hundreds of miles away. That is who Donald Trump is choosing to stand beside and to protect. He chose this man over our democratic ally who has stood beside us for more than 70 years.
He also chose to call these exercises “hostile.” What he is attempting to vilify are the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, which are planned to begin tomorrow with approximately 18,000 South Korean troops and personnel from eleven additional UN Command member states. They were specifically designed this year to account for the increasing threat caused by North Korea’s growing military partnership with Russia and the battlefield experience North Korean troops gained fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. A senior UN Command officer said just days ago that the exercises were built around this evolving reality. These were rehearsals for their countries’ survival, not provocations.
“While somewhat unrelated (?).” Trump wrote, putting a question mark in parentheses as if that somehow gave him plausible deniability while he admitted, out in the open, exactly what he was doing. He asked South Korea to join his war with Iran. They said no. And now he is punishing them for it.
This isn’t some business deal where Trump can punish someone for refusing to give him what he wants. He is playing with an alliance built over generations, and with the safety of millions of people on the Korean Peninsula and around the entire world. The President of the United States of America is retaliating against an ally and using American military protection as leverage to pressure them into joining his war. What he is doing is extortion. Plain and simple.
What’s at stake in the game Donald Trump is playing could not be more serious, because this extends way beyond the peninsula. If the deterrent of having our support erodes, and Pyongyang believes that the United States is no longer serious about defending South Korea, the consequences could be catastrophic. A weakened American presence in Korea changes China’s calculation regarding Taiwan. It forces Japan to reconsider whether it can continue to depend on the United States for its defense, and hold to Article 9 of its constitution renouncing war, or whether it needs to start building the kind of military it has deliberately avoided since 1945.
What Donald Trump said in a social media post could send a shockwave through the entire Indo-Pacific security order that has prevented large-scale destabilization and conflict for 80 years. The last time the global alliance structure fractured this way was when major powers stopped trusting the agreements that held the peace, back in the 1930s. And we know how that ended.
Donald Trump does not want a wide-scale war, but he doesn’t want peace either. He wants a production with cameras and drama. He wants to be the handshake that ends conflict even if he is the one who caused it. Trump has always been impulsive and never considers the consequences or ramifications of his actions. He’s now bored with Iran. He thought he was special and that he would be the one who could snap his fingers and somehow end decades of hostility because everyone would bend to Donald Trump. Instead, he was humiliated, and now he is looking for something, anything, that will make him look powerful again.
This is a betrayal of South Korea. But it is also a warning to every ally we have left. If Trump will do this to a nation of more than 50 million people, he will do it to anyone. South Korean soldiers fought and died alongside ours in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Their country has hosted American troops for more than 70 years. They rebuilt from the ashes of war into one of the strongest democracies and economies in the world. This is an alliance built over generations, through sacrifice, trust, and the shared belief that America would keep its word.
Japan is watching. Taiwan and Australia are watching. The Baltic states, already preparing for what a weakened NATO could mean with Russia at their doorstep, are also watching. Every country that built its national defense around the belief that America keeps its word now has to ask a question that would have been almost unthinkable two years ago. They are asking themselves, and each other, whether they can still trust the United States. And right now, the answer is no.
It breaks my heart to even write that. Because I love my country. I love what America has stood for at its best. But I also care deeply about the rest of the world. I care about people of different nationalities and their right to live safely and freely in the countries they love. None of us exists in isolation on this planet. We are deeply interconnected, and stability anywhere helps create stability everywhere.
Most of us, aside from our Indigenous communities, came from somewhere else at some point in our family histories. We are tied to places near and far, sometimes to countries we have never visited and people we will never meet. Our blood and our stories still run through those places. And loving our own country should never require someone else to lose theirs.
Donald Trump has never understood that. To him, patriotism is possession. America being strong means someone else must be weak. America winning means someone else must lose. But that was never what made this country powerful. Our greatest strength came from building alliances with people who loved their countries just as fiercely as we loved ours, and understanding that we were safer when we stood together.
Trump is tearing that apart. He just told the world that commitments only matter for as long as he personally finds them useful. Give him what he wants, and he calls us allies. Tell him no, and decades of cooperation and sacrifice will disappear in an instant. Donald Trump has turned the United States into a protection racket. We are on the verge of complete isolation because when the most powerful country in the world starts treating its friends that way, eventually it stops having any.
We have never had an American president like this. We have had corrupt presidents and incompetent ones. We have had presidents who lied to the public, who overreached their authority, who made catastrophic foreign policy decisions that cost thousands of lives and destabilized entire regions. But we have never had a president who treated allied nations like enemies or threats. We have never had a president who openly sided with a nuclear-armed dictator over our democratic ally. Donald Trump is the first to use the security of millions of civilians as a bargaining chip because their government would not join his separate, unrelated losing war.
Donald Trump is a deeply flawed man. He is corrupt to a level unseen before in American history. He is indifferent to human life and suffering on a scale that no American president has ever displayed in public. And he is not ashamed of it. He is proud.
Ever since I saw that terrible Truth Social post, that he reshared again hours later, I’ve been asking myself what America means. Not what it has become under this president, but what it is supposed to be. What it used to represent to the rest of the world. And I keep coming back to a conversation I had years ago, in a place I never expected to learn something about my own country.
Seven or eight years ago, we were in Jamaica to create content about traveling to the island. We had booked a private tour through a guide that came recommended to us by another guest at the resort. She was leaving the day we arrived, and she told me the tour was the highlight of their entire trip. She and her husband had booked a plantation tour and learned so much history, including American history, which made sense once I understood how deeply intertwined Jamaica’s colonial past is with the transatlantic slave trade and the economic systems that built the American South. The same plantations, ships, and human suffering shaped both countries. She said she wanted to come back with her teenage children because there was so much they needed to see. I immediately booked the same tour for my family.
When he came to pick us up, he was not alone. He had someone else with him, which I thought was odd because everything I had been told said it was just him. And as we drove, it became clear we were not heading toward the historic plantation I had booked. We were driving up into the hills, and he was telling us about the country in a way that no resort brochure ever would. He explained how the higher up the mountain you live, the more expensive the homes are because you are closest to the fresh water, and by the time it reaches the communities at the bottom, it has been contaminated. He told us about disease and poverty throughout the island, and about the infrastructure that most tourists never see. At one point, we passed a school, and all of the children came rushing to the fence to watch us go by. He said they did not see many visitors up here. I was confused but still hopeful after all of the positive reviews I had read.
It turned out I had booked what amounted to a working farm tour rather than the historical plantation I had planned. And as so often happens when you travel, the thing that went “wrong” turned out to be the thing that mattered most. One of the greatest lessons traveling has taught me is to stay flexible and to lean into the unexpected, because when things don’t go the way you planned, there is almost always something better around the corner. That has been true nearly every single time.
We spent the day on a small working farm, learning about farming practices, tasting tropical fruit straight from the trees, walking among the rows, hearing about the dozens of varieties of mangoes that grow in Jamaica. It was beautiful and unhurried and nothing like what I had planned. And while I was walking the grounds, I started talking with one of the men who worked the farm.
He lit up when he learned we were from America and shared, in such a profound way, why to him it was the greatest place on the planet. He said it was hard work, but it was the land of opportunity. And then he said something that I have carried with me every day since: “More importantly, it is the safe place. It is where there are standards. Where the government respects the people. You are the good guys. You are there when the world needs help. You set the standards for the rest of us.”
Nothing he said took away from the love he shared for his own country. On the contrary, he looked at America as a beacon for what he wanted for Jamaica. He wasn’t saying he wanted his country to become ours. He wanted the same safety for his family and the same opportunity. The same expectation that government should respect its people and that there should be standards no one, no matter how powerful, was allowed to cross.
And I think that distinction matters so much right now. Loving America was never supposed to mean believing we deserved something other people didn’t. At our best, America gave people around the world a reason to believe those things were possible for them, too.
And this isn’t about blind American exceptionalism. We have never been perfect, and there are long, painful chapters of our history when we failed spectacularly to live up to the values we claimed as our own. We were never simply “the best.” But there was a promise embedded in what America was always striving to become. That freedom should expand, and that democracy should endure. That people should be safe from their government, not afraid of it. And that when we fell short of those ideals, we were supposed to keep fighting our way closer to them.
That was the America he saw from that farm in Jamaica, and I don’t want us to lose the country he believed we could be.
America was built on a radical and extraordinary idea, one that held true to the promise that ordinary people could govern themselves. That power flows up from the people, not down from a throne. That you do not have to be born into the right family or the right country to have a chance at a decent life. No other nation in history was founded on a thesis statement. Most countries are built on geography, or ethnicity, or conquest. America was built on a sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It has never fully lived up to that sentence. Not for Native communities or for Black Americans. Not for women or for immigrants who built this country with their hands and have been told so many times throughout our 250 years they did not belong here, but never gave up. Every generation has fought to expand who is included in this promise. From abolitionists to suffragists to civil rights marchers and marriage equality advocates, they have all made this country more of what it was always meant to be. That is what separates America from every empire that came before it. We have never been perfect, but we have never stopped trying.
There was another consequence of that struggle that we rarely talk about. The rest of the world was always watching. Every time we expanded freedom, confronted another piece of our own hypocrisy, or chose democracy over the easier path of raw power, we were telling people far beyond our borders something about who America was trying to be. That reputation was never perfect, and it was never universally deserved. But it mattered, and now the world is losing what little faith it still has in us. Martin Bella shared a post on social media that says what millions of people around the globe are thinking, and that we, Americans, need to hear before it is too late:
“To the people of the United States of America: you realize that you are being seen by the rest of the world as no better than Russia, no better than China? You’ve threatened Canada, threatened Greenland, invaded Venezuela, and starved Cuba. You’ve caused untold pain around the world. The Strait of Hormuz and the blocking of oil supplies has brought countries to their knees. Now your president is saying that he’s going to make the Strait of Hormuz American territory? Have you people lost touch with reality? While he sits in that chair, the American people are responsible. Go a little further and have a look at the way you are allowing him to treat your sailors: The disrespect he showed the bodies of your servicemen that came back. The way American citizens are being treated on the street. You are allowing it. The people of Iran rose up, and thousands of them were killed. You sit back and watch this man prey on the rest of the world. Disgraceful.”
I saw his video, and I thought about the man on the farm. I thought about the look on his face when he said the word “safe.” About how certain he was that America was the place that would always do the right thing. It breaks my heart to think about what he might say about us now.
But I also keep coming back to something else. The America he believed in does not have to disappear just because Donald Trump is trying to destroy it. In fact, maybe our responsibility now is to finally build it. We aren’t just fighting against an authoritarian. We are fighting for the promise of better days and for the country we were always meant to be. This is what we are voting for in November, and why so much is riding on the midterm elections. It is up to us to save our country and our place in the world. And in true American fashion, when our voices are heard and Trump’s power is finally weakened, we are going to do what this country has done at every turning point in its history. We are going to take whatever is left, whatever he has not managed to burn down, and we are going to build it back. But this time, we are not going to rebuild what was. We are going to build what was always supposed to be. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the Day: I am already planning our Halloween decorations for this year, because finding joy wherever you can is part of the resistance, too. This guy was the focal point at our old house last year. I am thinking about how he can do his part for democracy this year as well. Maybe a “VOTE” sign? Open to suggestions.
Sources used in the writing of this post:
Martin Bella on Instagram
Trump boards Air Force One en route to Joint Base Andrews: YouTube
Thank you for this eloquent essay. You have captured the concern and the dismay that so many of us Americans feel at the demented antics of this so-called American leader. As you stated, trumpet doesn't care about this country. His antics are aimed at keeping the world's attention on him and him alone. All the other errors of the unnecessary war with Iran, and his kissing up to Kim and Putin and Xi and other dictators only shed light on his obsession with being the big man to whom everyone kowtows. We must stand up against his ignorant, dangerous, and potentially deadly foreign pronouncements.
Parts of your article we're very uplifting. Hearing you tell the story of the man in Jamaica and what he thought of America made me smile. And then I thought about what Trump has done to our country, which you so eloquently described. It is hard for me to convey the sorrow, embarrassment, and humiliation I feel about this country right now. Ever since he was elected president and for the last too many months I find myself feeling more and more helpless and hopeless. I truly cannot comprehend what people saw and still see in him after all he's put us through. I am doing my best to support Democrat candidates, participating in activities like No Kings, and that helps some but not enough to lift my mood. I have relatives that are MAGA and it has become excruciatingly difficult to talk to these people. With Trump turning his back on South Korea, that just takes the cake. The ironic thing is when Trump started this illegal "excursion" as he likes to call it, he told our allies he didn't want their help; we could do it on our own. Then when things got tough he changed his tune and wanted help .He's ostracized and turned against the nations that rightly did not want to get involved. 2028 can't come soon enough. Thank you very much for your excellent insights to this quagmire he's he's keeping us in.