Great for Who
"Great" for Who?
People like Trump aren’t making America great again. They’re making it small. Small enough to fit inside one kind of skin, one kind of zip code, one kind of lie. They’re making it great for white people only, and calling that patriotism.
I watched a white fighter get on national TV and say Michelle Obama is a man. Said it with his chest, like it was brave. It wasn’t brave. It was disgraceful. It was plain ignorance, and it didn’t come from nowhere. That kind of poison gets mainlined straight from Trump’s playbook. For years he built his brand on attacking the Obamas. He didn’t debate policy. He attacked their birth, their bodies, their legitimacy. He took the oldest, laziest racism in America and put a gold-plated microphone in front of it.
And it worked. Because there are white people who claim to be educated who still, in 2026, say Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen. People with degrees who never read a single book by him. Never listened to one of Michelle’s speeches all the way through. Never met them, never followed their work, never did anything but swallow the same recycled birther garbage Trump made fashionable. That’s not education. That’s a Eurocentric echo chamber where whiteness is the default and everything else has to prove it belongs.
A well-rounded education teaches you to check your sources. It teaches you to sit with discomfort instead of turning it into a conspiracy. It teaches you that “I don’t like them” is not the same as “they’re illegitimate.” But too many people are trapped in a system that taught them America is a story about white men, and anything outside that frame must be fake, dangerous, or male.
So a Black woman with two Ivy League degrees, a bestselling memoir, and more grace than most of us could manage in a lifetime gets reduced to a punchline about her gender. Why? Because Trump made it okay. He made it a strategy. Dehumanize, delegitimize, distract. If you can get people arguing about Michelle Obama’s body, they’re not talking about wages. If you can get them questioning Barack’s birth certificate, they’re not asking who gutted the Voting Rights Act.
That’s the game. Make America “great” by shrinking the definition of American. Make it so “real American” only looks one way. And when you do that, you don’t have to govern. You just have to point and yell.
But I’ve lived in this country too long to buy it. America was never great for all people. It was great for some, at the expense of others. The job isn’t to go back. The job is to finally, actually, make it great for everyone. That means calling out the lie when a man on TV tries to strip a Black woman of her womanhood for applause. It means naming Trump’s racism as the fuel, not the footnote. It means telling the “educated” birthers that a diploma doesn’t cure willful ignorance.
Cyrus was killed for taking water. Michelle Obama is mocked for existing. Same root. Different branch. The idea that some lives, some dignity, some citizenship can be questioned, taken, denied — because they’re not white.
I’m not interested in an America that’s great for one color. I’m interested in the America we haven’t built yet. The one where a Black family in the White House doesn’t trigger a decade-long tantrum. The one where “great” doesn’t mean “reclaimed for white people.” The one where water isn’t a crime and womanhood isn’t a debate.
Trump and his followers are selling a country that’s smaller, meaner, and whiter. That’s not greatness. That’s fear with a flag on it. And I’m done pretending it’s anything else.
*Cathryn m harris
