The Illusion of Freedom
The Uncomfortable Truth Trump Exposed
By: Vix Burgett-Prunty
Let’s cut through the noise for a minute. America sells itself as the "land of the free," but freedom has always been a conditional privilege here, not a universal right. Some people get to enjoy it, others get just enough of a taste to keep them believing in the myth. Then Trump came along and did something unexpected: he showed us how the machine really works.
He didn’t invent the corruption, the hypocrisy, or the authoritarian impulses of the U.S. government. He just turned them up to full volume and made it impossible to ignore. Suddenly, the people who spent years insisting America was a flawless democracy had to grapple with the reality that our institutions are fragile, our laws are flexible for the powerful, and our so-called freedoms can vanish overnight if the right (or wrong) person is in charge.
Take immigration, for example. For decades, both parties have supported brutal policies, detention camps, family separations, militarized borders, but they’ve always hidden behind bureaucratic language to make it sound civilized. Trump dropped the euphemisms. He said the quiet part out loud, and in doing so, he revealed how thin the veneer of American morality really is. The same system that claims to value human rights can justify locking children in cages if the politics demand it.
Or look at surveillance. After 9/11, the U.S. government built an unprecedented spying apparatus, monitoring its own citizens with barely any pushback from the public. Why? Because fear works. We were told it was for our safety, so we traded privacy for the illusion of security. Trump didn’t create the Patriot Act or the NSA’s mass data collection, he just proved that those tools could easily be turned against the population by any leader with an agenda.
And let’s talk about protest. The moment people rise up, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, or the anti-war movements, the response from the state is always disproportionate force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, surveillance, and propaganda. Trump escalated it, sure, but the infrastructure was already there. The difference is that now, more people are waking up to the fact that dissent is only tolerated as long as it doesn’t threaten the status quo.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: America has always been authoritarian when it needs to be. It just prefers to wear a friendly face, smiling politicians, hollow rhetoric about liberty, and a media that frames oppression as "policy differences." Trump shattered that illusion. He proved that the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed. The real question is: What are we going to do about it?
Because freedom isn’t something you’re given. It’s something you take. And if we want a country that actually lives up to its promises, we’re going to have to demand more than just a change of faces in power. We’ll need to dismantle the machinery that keeps real democracy out of reach.
Otherwise, the illusion will keep winning.