Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen marked the United States' 250th anniversary with a scathing essay arguing the nation's defining trait isn't liberty or opportunity, but cruelty, and placed President Donald Trump at the center of that critique.
In the essay, Nguyen described Trump as a "would-be American Nero" whose government has turned immigration enforcement into what he called a spectacle of "cruelty," pointing to masked agents pursuing immigrants in the streets and harsh detention conditions.
Nguyen, who arrived in the U.S. as a Vietnamese refugee the year before the bicentennial, argued that the "cruelty" wasn't new but had been present since the nation's founding, citing the displacement of Native Americans, slavery, and the exploitation of Chinese, Mexican and other immigrant labor as part of a continuous imperial pattern.
"Empires do not often share power or decline gracefully. The idea that the United States might save itself from itself seems far away, just as the idea that Israel could do the same looks impossible," Nguyen wrote.
"Change will come mostly from external defeats and pressures and from the explosions of internal contradictions. The role of patriotic Americans is not to participate in the cruelty and to call out that cruelty for what it is. But too many Americans believe that patriotism means continuing to exert American power and violence, masked by the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, in order to keep a staggering giant on its feet."
Nguyen connected that history to current foreign policy, criticizing bipartisan U.S. support for Israel's military campaign in Gaza and linking it to what he described as America's own founding violence. He also pointed to the war on Iran as evidence of imperial overreach.
Nguyen concluded that saving the country requires humility and repentance rather than continued assertions of dominance, arguing that both Israel and the U.S. are currently "led by its worst," and that new leadership alone won't fix the underlying problem unless it rejects the idea of American exceptionalism entirely.