Dreaming of the White House

On shattering American exceptionalism

“Daddy, why don’t you run for president?” I asked him.

On a good traffic day, we lived about 30 minutes outside Washington D.C. On weekend strolls around the city, I’d trail behind as we passed the White House, mesmerized by its sprawling landscape, ever inaccessible behind security-guarded fencing, and dream that one day I’d be lucky enough to live there. From what I knew about the world, if you dreamed hard enough, the dream was yours to keep. The American dream was yours to keep. So, I dreamed of America. I dreamed of the White House. Call me naive, but could you blame me? I was a child, and these were the dreams we were all spoon fed—at least where I grew up.

Before I ever knew who Hillary Clinton was, my mother dressed me up as her for an “America” themed spirit day—or was it the Fourth of July?—I was seven years old and in summer camp, that I know. She draped me in a white T-shirt picturing the American flag, reading “Future President” underneath, scribbled in children’s handwriting—one of many iterations immigrants sold at tourist stands scattered around the Capitol—and put a chunky pearl necklace around my neck. She informed me that Hillary Clinton was a blonde, like me, and an inspirational woman worth looking up to, like I would certainly be one day. I accepted the role without question, obviously—I loved playing dress-up. My camp counsellors, aware that I had no clue who she was, chuckled as I introduced myself. I pretended to be in on the joke.

The pledge of allegiance tattooed into my forehead every morning, I already gladly worshipped America. Hand over my heartbeat, I chanted the words like I meant them before I had even a clue what they meant. I bled red, white, and blue. In school choir, I sang songs of freedom, because this was where freedom rang. There was no question in my developing little mind that America was the best country on Earth. And the White House? It was the best house on Earth, obviously—that’s why they gave it to the president. Only the very best for the president and his family. Naturally, I wanted a taste of the best. Naturally, I wanted to live there one day. And naturally, indoctrinated with bootstraps mythology of the American dream, I earnestly believed I could. So I asked him,

“Daddy, why don’t you run for president?”

“I don’t have enough money,” he muttered impatiently.

“Why does that matter?” I naively pressed. “I thought anybody can be president. You just have to be old enough.”

“You need a lot of money,” he replied shortly, and he left it at that.

No further explanation. I didn’t question him.

My father, you see… he never had a problem with shattering children’s illusions. He was more than willing to hit kids with the hard truth—happy to, even. He raped us, after all—the most earth-shattering truth of all, crushing any assumptions I held of family, safety, and protection, all in an instant. Breaking the harsh news of capitalism, of corporate-bought elections, of corrupt politicians—that shouldn’t hurt too much worse. He was just being honest. And I had to give him credit—if someone had to bear this bad news eventually, he was well-suited for the job. He loved to squash naïveté right under his boot. Unless it served his own interests, he had no interest in the preservation of fantasy. The facts of our shared reality were constructed in accordance to how they benefited him, and he sifted out whatever couldn’t. That fly buzzing in his ear, asking him to run for president, was nothing short of annoying—didn’t serve his interests at all. So he swatted me away with the hard truth.

At least it was the truth. For all of his crimes and cruelty, on the rare occasions he decided to tell the truth, my father had a knack for telling it bluntly. Cannily similar to our next president, he was a liar who told the truth—simultaneously above the law and knee-deep in the murky swamp of criminal activity, participating in it and exposing it at the same time. He was willing to blurt a select few truths others would never dare (as long as they benefitted him), to speak them from the heart, even, in a manner that somehow managed to build trust with listening ears—my listening ears included. I easily trusted my father’s words. Seven years old, I learned the harsh truth that day: only rich people can be president.

Digesting this reality was challenging—it fully contradicted the gospel of meritocracy I was actively taught in school. Accepting my father’s words threatened to shatter the vision of equality I had been fed. My entire elementary curriculum had been designed to instil faith in the perfection of a post-racial America, where class differences were merely a measure of how hard people worked in life, the direct reflection of one’s moral and spiritual standing. I was raised by the Protestant work ethic—wherein the world was set up fairly for everyone, money was always earned through hard work, power was always earned through hard work, and thus those in positions of power could be automatically trusted, because surely it reflected their history of hard work, and hard work reflected both goodness and Godliness.

We were spoon-fed a state-sanctioned curriculum of nationalist propaganda, one where sugar-coated stories of breaking bread over Thanksgiving feasts erased the violent history of colonialism. And while the motivations behind this gross simplification of the world are justifiable to colonial powers—preserving the “innocence” of childhood, creating good workers, imposing normative morality—the inevitable unlearning process feels like pulling teeth. American exceptionalism proves to be a myth far more challenging to unlearn than the tooth fairy, a myth far and few set out to unlearn at all. Good thing my father had no interest in preserving innocence. My rapist’s careless, illusion-shattering rhetoric was precisely what I needed to crush my own illusion of the American Dream, albeit prematurely.

No more dreaming of the White House.

Pushing my head under water long before I was ready, pulling the rug out from under me, breaking open the earth beneath my feet—whatever you want to call his Unique Parenting Style—forced me to construct my very own ideological foundation from scratch, as my peers comfortably rested upon the structure we’d been provided. Twenty years later, it seems that Trump’s re-election is serving a similar function for my former peers and for the collective—ringing alarm bells, pushing unready heads into consciousness, and begging average liberals to question their drilled-in and taken-for-granted assumptions of American exceptionalism. After decades of carefully sustained faith in the protection and comfort of America, just enough comfort to fall asleep inside the bed of imperialism, it seems that a fascist-rapist-felon-liar—whatever you want to call him—getting re-elected, and specifically threatening reproductive rights, is the straw that finally broke the average liberal’s back. His first election was officially no longer a fluke, as many wished it could be framed, not a mere misstep we could inevitably scrub from our glorious nation’s archive to retrieve our faux respectability. These results spoke loudly and clearly, forcing all to hear: This is America.

I hate to break the news, but this was always America. Our exceptional “freedom” has always been precariously built upon the militarized exploitation and violation of peoples’ freedoms around the globe—America is a rapist. A serial rapist, raping the globe through mass extraction, mass extinction, mass incarceration, mass poverty, mass murder, and mass denial of war crimes beyond comprehension. War crimes that produce sexual violence and strip reproductive freedom of populations around the globe. Mass incarceration that functions as modern day slavery, breeding the same sexual violence of slavery’s origins. This is America; this was always America. Yet it is only as soon as neoliberal ideals of American “freedom” get threatened that all panic breaks loose. And while this sheltered and grossly delayed consciousness-raising process leaves me frustrated to say the least, if Trump is what it took to finally shatter the masses’ visions of American exceptionalism, I’m happy with the side effects. It’s long overdue. It needed to happen.

After Election Day, I expressed relief over the illusion-shattering properties of the election results. In my bird’s eye political view, I would much prefer widespread liberal upset over the prolonged mass denial of neoliberalism. In my eyes, as ecological and political collapse inevitably looms, we can no longer afford to continue pacifying Americans with a pretty face “protecting our rights” while enacting our nation’s age old colonial project of global terrorism. “I’d prefer a wolf to a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” I told a friend. Unsurprisingly, my outlook was met with skepticism. My friend’s reason for disagreeing, she told me, was that she simply couldn’t get past the whole rapist thing. It disturbed her. Pay no mind that our entire nation was and is continually built upon rape and genocide—a rapist in the highest office is where good liberals draw the line. Still, I can’t blame her. If the president functions as a symbol of our national identity, what upstanding American would want to be represented by a rapist?

Where my perspective diverges is that I believe a rapist symbolizing our national identity is only fitting for a rapist nation. I value representational accuracy. I prefer to call a spade a spade. If our nation has no plan to quit raping and pillaging the earth and the global South, then an experienced rapist is simply qualified for the job. He offers us a more accurate symbol for the role our nation continues to play on the global stage regardless of who wins the presidency—a role that, if played by a female Democrat, would be terribly obscured in the public eye. I’m simply cheerleading an end to the mass denial—for Americans to unlearn the false narratives of American history we were all fed in grade school, to reconstruct history accurately, to learn from it, and to perhaps finally stop repeating it.

Trust me, I’m embarrassed by the fact that he’s our president, too. But is it any more embarrassing than the man who coined the term “misunderestimated” launching a senseless, decade-long war in the Middle East justified by the sham of weapons of mass destruction that never existed in the first place? Is it any more embarrassing than a nation singing the praises of a Black man, celebrating his impressive Harvard education, hip music taste, and pristine public speaking skills as he violently expanded the drone program, killing innocent children and irreversibly altering modern warfare? Every U.S. president is a mass murderer—what makes a rapist so much more worse? Every president commands over the U.S. military, facilitating the multiple layers of rape that unfold in every iteration of militarized imperialism. By this logic, every recent U.S. president has been a rapist, too, if only a few steps removed. And all metaphor aside, Trump is neither the first literal rapist president. Reality check: twelve U.S. presidents owned slaves, who they were permitted to freely rape without consequence—that’s over 25% of our entire presidential history.

Our nation was built on rape, on slaves, on raping slaves, and on stealing their labor. Our nation was built on forced sex and forced labor—on raping bodies and raping the land—by men who believed they owned both of these. Until the 1970s, marital rape was completely legal in every single state in this nation, and most states still had a “marital exemption” for rape until the 90s. I have no doubt in my mind that at the very least, many former U.S. presidents raped their wives, their slaves, or both. More likely than not, a good amount, if not the majority, of our past presidents have been rapists. This is not to excuse it—this is merely to say that our country was and continues to be built on both rape and the widespread denial of rape. This reality is hidden and obscured by the very mythology of American exceptionalism that so many are still desperate to keep alive—a mythology built on the nationalist propaganda fed to us all, those passed-down tales of liberty and justice for all, of freedom-fighting, of nuclear families and nuclear warfare, of good ‘ole Christian morality, those familiar tastes we learned to love. America is a story we tell ourselves. It’s an embarrassing story.

I find Trump a bit less embarrassing, if I’m being honest, because at least we’re not taking him seriously. At least the liberal masses have finally stopped respecting the U.S. presidency. At least they might finally see the position for what it is—a senseless colonial project, one none of us should have ever respected or felt comforted by, but one we were force-fed, and one that has always been an embarrassment to the world. Thank God—at least we finally found one that embarrasses a good majority of Americans. One so wildly, blatantly, and undeniably embarrassing, no longer obscured by a facade of civility, that we might finally call a spade… embarrassing.

So, while it certainly embarrasses me, it does not disturb me to have a rapist as our president—it’s nothing new. I once dreamed of my very own rapist becoming president. I know what it’s like to look up to a rapist, to have a rapist in the highest position in the land. I know what it means to have a rapist as the Commander in Chief of my life—been there, done that. The greatest fear haunting the American populace, at risk of sounding insensitive, does not scare me—I already know what it feels like to be stripped of reproductive autonomy by a rapist. And just as quickly as my faith in the authority of “father” was eroded, so too was my faith in the authority of “president”. It didn’t take a rapist getting elected for me to realize the state wouldn’t protect me. All it took was being raised by a rapist. All it took was being forcibly handed over into his custody, weekend after weekend, for him to do to my body as he pleased. All it took was my weekly plea getting shut down over and over again—“Please, Mommy, I don’t want to see him,” followed by “You have to.” And why did I have to?

The state. “Because if I don’t, they’ll send me to jail, and then you’ll have to live with him all the time.” It was a terrible threat to hear from my own mother. My mother was forced by the state to hand me off to my rapist every weekend—or else she would be breaking court order, and she would be sent to jail. By state law, she had to feed me to the wolves. The state controlled my movement week after week, controlled where my body was mandated to go and whose custody it belonged to. The state forced me into my rapist’s possession. If I had it my way, I would have run away—only to get sent right back into state custody. At a young age, in a manner most children are shielded from, I became fully aware that my body did not belong to me. On a visibly evident level, my body belonged to both my mother and my rapist. On a deeper level, my body belonged to the state. Thousands of days of my life were, by state mandate, spent in the custody of my rapist. Needless to say, I know what it’s like to be powerless under a rapist’s rule—and I know what it’s like to be even more powerless under the state’s rule, regardless of who the president is.

American exceptionalism teaches us that Americans are exceptions to the rule, simply because we are exceptional, and thus whatever sacrifices are necessary to uphold our exceptionalism are automatically justified. By this exceptional logic, of course, my story should be painted as a horrific exception, rather than the hidden reality underlying state power. Yet rape is as American as cherry pie. It is not only normal under colonialism—it serves as the foundation of colonialism.¹ And while this underground reality is currently being illuminated in mainstream conversations over rampant misogyny and threats to reproductive rights, American imperialism remains the greatest threat to life on Earth, regardless of who the president is. If it takes yet another rapist president to finally shatter misplaced faith in the colonial project we call America, then so be it. I’ll be on the sidelines, cheerleading an end to the mass denial—and the end of an empire.²

1. For a deeper exploration into how the colonial state manufactures sexual violence, you can read my publication titled Sexual Citizenship, Incest, and the State: ‘The Unseen of the Crime”.

2. Please don’t interject here with “damage control” arguments or “lesser evil” mythos. I consider consciousness raising to be a large form of “damage control,” and we are far too late for “lesser evil” logic. Both function only as extensions of our mass denial, denying the reality of impending ecological collapse. No more Presidents, please.