Core Memories of American Unexceptionalism

I’m angry that my daughter, age 13, has grown up during the Trump years, alongside the misogyny, meanness, and racial violence he cultivates. She doesn’t remember any of the Obama years; she was four when Trump won. In 2025, my own memories of the Obama years are distant and fading. His presidency feels less like the halcyon days and more like a missed opportunity.

I’m nearing 50. I got lulled by the Obama years into forgetting the world I grew up in: the mean Reagan years, followed by the hollow H.W. Bush years. My bus ride to school was 45 minutes long, and the driver listened to Rush Limbaugh rant about women and immigrants the entire ride. On the way back, kids called me a nerd as I climbed on board, because I was in the “high academic class.” Other kids were bullied for being poor. This is the America that paved the way for Trump: disdain for intellectualism and hatred of poor people, people of color, and women.

Women my age watched Anita Hill bravely describe the sexual harassment she had endured, putting a name to something we’d already experienced, even as children. Then we watched Clarence Thomas sworn in to a seat of power that he has used to enrich himself while meticulously disenfranchising women and people of color.

We watched Bill Clinton throw a woman our age under the bus after abusing his power over her. In college, I cast my very first vote for Bill Clinton (and felt proud!) but I also wrote my final high school research paper on the harm of his Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. When a man I thought I was in love with described details of the Starr report—that cigar—with real enjoyment, I felt sick but didn’t say so because I was trying to play it cool.

George W. Bush didn’t truly win the presidency, and watching him further American aggression in the world, while fumbling the American disaster of Hurricane Katrina, I felt a kind of deadening of my nerve endings—better to be half-numb than completely awake for the horrors of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. My husband and I were abroad for half of the Bush years, which provided a pleasing illusion of insulation between us and the crimes of our country.

When I watched Obama’s inauguration with my graduate school friends, it felt like my body was thawing out after a deep freeze. We hugged and cried and cheered. The moment was beautiful and the feelings were real and deep. But we mistook feeling for lasting reality.

White Americans didn’t understand Obama’s years as a band-aid on America, and we didn’t put in place structures necessary to protect us from what’s happening now. We were lulled into forgetting the systems Reagan put in place, the systems our country literally grew from, which continued to hum along while we Yes We Canned our way toward a racist, sexist conman.

I hate that my daughter is growing up in this system. And I hate that I did too. So when Trump is gone and maga has inevitably dissolved into its fragmented racist factions, I hope we won’t be lulled into complacence again. We should dance in the streets when a progressive government finally wins, but the system will continue on if we fall asleep after the party is over.