No Kings, No Memory: The Liberal Myth of a Better America

Why focusing on Trump as the root of America’s ills obscures a longer, more insidious pattern in American politics

Photo by Sean Ferigan on Unsplash

This essay argues that the current crisis facing the United States cannot be understood as a rupture caused by any single administration, but as the continuation of a much longer imperial project — one built through colonial expansion, foreign intervention, racialized governance, and the normalization of permanent war. By tracing the histories of Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Palestine alongside contemporary protest movements, the author examines how American democracy is routinely invoked to justify violence abroad and repression at home, and how liberal movements that refuse to confront this legacy risk reproducing the very structures they claim to oppose.

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Less than a year ago, I was in Florence, standing among hundreds of American expats at what was billed as the first worldwide “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration. We were electrified, united against a common enemy, denouncing the cruelty of the past few months — the families torn apart at the border, the gutting of the Department of Education, the attacks on universities, the criminalization of dissent. The streets filled with chicken hats, bloated orange Trump balloons, and neatly lettered No Kings signs. And yet something felt off. By reducing the crisis to one man, the protest offered a familiar kind of relief. Remove Trump, and the spell would break. Order would return. But standing there, amid the spectacle and slogans, I couldn’t shake the sense that we were protesting the symptom—not the disease.

Months later, I was part of the committee to plan a follow-up protest along with other Americans in Europe. We chatted on Whatsapp and Slack, doling out responsibilities and coordinating actions. However, when the conversation in the group turned to Gaza, the cracks began to show. Some members complained that others were posting “too much” about the genocide — that it had nothing to do with the “threat to democracy” back home. A new member, uneasy about the volume of posts, asked whether she had joined the wrong group because she “had family in Israel,” threatening to leave. To my surprise, several members urged her to stay, emphasizing how important her presence was, even as others posting about Palestine were marginalized and, in some cases, removed from the group chat. 

I have never been patriotic. As a woman of Puerto Rican heritage who has lived through some of the island’s hardest years as a modern-day colony — and as someone who has watched attacks on Indigenous, Black, and Latinx communities across the mainland for years — I sensed the naiveté in a movement that seemed to believe Trump was the only thing wrong with the United States. As if he emerged from a vacuum. As if the rise of white supremacy, fascism, and Christian nationalism were new phenomena rather than the country’s oldest inheritance.

When Joe Biden promised to “restore the soul of the nation,” Puerto Rico was already years into a post–Hurricane Maria reality of rolling blackouts and chronic power failures—a crisis that continued well into his presidency. The words sounded noble, as if America had once been whole and could be made whole again. But for Puerto Ricans living on the island, there was no golden age, only shifting faces of the same empire: Obama’s technocrats imposing austerity, Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane survivors, Biden promising recovery while private vulture companies still own the grid. “No Kings,” the republic once declared. But colonies like mine have always lived under one crown or another.

Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii (What Happened to Hawaii)

"Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa / Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya  / No, no sueltes la bandera ni olvides el lelolai / Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái"

– Bad Bunny, Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii

Before Hawai’i became the 5oth state, it was an independent nation recognized under international law holding treaties and trade agreements with over 90 countries around the world–including the United States. Throughout the 19th century U.S. missionaries and sugar barons settled in the Hawaiian islands, first to spread christian “civilization", later turning their attention to the profitable sugar cane. By the time 1887 rolled around, the “Bayonet Constitution,” forced on King Kalākaua at gunpoint by American settlers, had stripped the monarchy of power and handed voting rights to the white settler elite.

When Queen Liliʻuokalani inherited the throne four years later, she immediately sought to restore sovereignty to Native Hawaiians by rewriting the constitution. A fearful group of American sugar planters formed the “Committee of Safety” to protect their profits, turning to the U.S. Minister John L. Stevens for help. On January 17, 1893, Stevens ordered Marines from the USS Boston ashore, claiming to defend American lives and property. Surrounded by U.S. guns and unwilling to see her people slaughtered, the Queen surrendered under protest—“until such time as the Government of the United States shall undo the action of its representatives.” 

Within days, the businessmen declared a provisional government and began lobbying for annexation, which was granted in 1898 along with the adoption of Puerto Rico and Guam as US territories.  The annexation, passed through a congressional resolution, had no legal force under international law, and has since been declared illegal by both U.N. Officials and the official congressional apology issued in 1993. 

However, at the time, the overthrow of Hawai’i marked the beginning of a new chapter of American power — one in which the United States, under the banner of protection and democracy, extended its reach across Latin America and the Caribbean to secure markets, resources, and strategic control.

The Case of Puerto Rico

In 1898, the Spanish-American War, sold to the public as a war of liberation  fought to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny,  quickly became a war of acquisition. Within months, the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, transforming them into outposts of its new global reach, and establishing a protectorate over Cuba. The Treaty of Paris ended Spanish rule but began America’s own. However, the historical significance of the U.S. victory over Spain wasn’t limited to territorial expansion. From that moment forward, the United States would cast its conquests as crusades for freedom, thus inaugurating the modern American myth: the U.S. as both cornerstone and custodian of democracy everywhere. 

In Puerto Rico, the Foraker Act of 1900 established a civilian government, replacing direct U.S. military rule after the war, but it left ultimate authority in the hands of a U.S.-appointed governor and an American-controlled executive council—ensuring that real power remained in Washington. In 1917, the Jones–Shafroth Act granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship just in time to draft them into World War I, while still denying them the right to vote for the president or hold full representation in Congress. In 1920, the Jones Act extended that control to trade, requiring that all goods shipped to or from Puerto Rico travel on U.S.-owned vessels—an arrangement that drove up prices and kept the island’s economy tethered to the mainland. For Puerto Ricans, it was a familiar story dressed in modern terms: taxation without representation, the same grievance that once sparked the American Revolution now entrenched as policy in the United State’s own colonies. 

When U.S. corporations began fleeing high labor costs on the mainland, Puerto Rico became an experimentation lab for export-led industrialization. Launched in the late 1940s, Operation Bootstrap (Manos a la Obra) promised modernity and jobs through tax exemptions and foreign investment. Instead, as historian César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe note in their book Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 it dismantled the island’s agricultural base, displaced tens of thousands of rural workers, and created an economy wholly dependent on U.S. imports and corporate subsidies. Factories came and went, leaving behind unemployment and polluted industrial zones. 

Resistance was met with violence and censorship. The Ley de la Mordaza of 1948 made it a crime to display the Puerto Rican flag or speak of independence. Leaders like Pedro Albizu Campos, head of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, were jailed, beaten, and in his case, tortured — his skin burned by radiation during his imprisonment in the 1950s. The FBI infiltrated nationalist movements, labeling them “subversive,” and mass arrests followed every uprising, from the Ponce Massacre of 1937 to the revolts of Jayuya and Utuado in 1950.

By the time Oscar López Rivera— the last Puerto Rican independence activist imprisoned for sedition— was granted clemency by Barack Obama in 2017, the colony had been under U.S. control for more than a century. Its economy was gutted by corporate tax exemptions, restricted trade, and predatory bond markets; the 2016 PROMESA Act, passed under the Obama administration, placed the island under the rule of an unelected fiscal board, known locally as La Junta, with sweeping power to override budgets, impose austerity, and restructure debt—a modern form of fiscal colonialism that returned the island to rule by outsiders under the guise of economic “stability.”

When Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, killing thousands and destroying critical infrastructure, the aftermath revealed the anatomy of disaster capitalism––the exploitation of large-scale catastrophes for corporate interests. The U.S. government’s slow, militarized, and bureaucratic response—led by FEMA—was compounded by private contractors and austerity policies that prioritized debt repayment over relief. Whitefish Energy, a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Trump administration, was awarded multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts to rebuild the island’s grid, which remains fragile years later. The result was a new wave of mass displacement—tens of thousands leaving for the mainland, while hedge funds circled the ruins for profit.

As journalist Naomi Klein observed in her book, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on The Disaster Capitalists, Puerto Rico has become a testing ground for some of the most audacious neoliberal policies. 

Now Puerto Rico has been repositioned as a military outpost for U.S. power in the Caribbean — a role it had not played so explicitly since the U.S. Navy was forced out of Vieques in 2003, after decades of mass civil disobedience against bombing exercises that poisoned land, water, and bodies. In recent months, the island has seen renewed military activity, surveillance infrastructure, and logistical coordination tied to U.S. operations in the region, including those directed at Venezuela. 

That this remilitarization is occurring in an unincorporated U.S. territory — one with no voting representation in Congress and still reeling from austerity, disaster capitalism, and infrastructural collapse — underscores how empire relies on colonial spaces to project force while denying those same spaces political sovereignty.

Venezuela and the Long Arc of U.S. Foreign Interventions

Early morning on January 3rd, the United States launched a dramatic military operation against Venezuela that shocked the world: U.S. airstrikes and a special-forces raid in Caracas resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who were flown to New York to face U.S. narcoterrorism charges. President Donald Trump openly declared that the United States would “run” Venezuela, at least temporarily, and signaled intentions to exploit the nation’s vast oil reserves.

While the overt seizure of a sitting foreign leader seems like a stark departure from even the boldest post-Cold War actions, in reality it is a continuation of a long pattern in U.S. foreign policy: interventions justified by a shifting set of ideological pretexts — from communist ideology to terrorism to drug trafficking — meanwhile the underlying motives often center strategic, economic, or geopolitical advantage.

During the Cold War, anti-communist rhetoric provided cover for a series of covert interventions designed to overthrow governments that threatened U.S. interests. In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup against democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz after he enacted land reforms that imperilled the holdings of the United Fruit Company, a U.S. agribusiness giant with immense economic and political influence. Árbenz was forced to resign, and the intervention ushered in decades of repression and a protracted civil war. 

In Iran in 1953, another CIA-backed coup toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he sought to nationalize the country’s oil industry. Although framed as a bulwark against Soviet influence, the operation installed a more compliant regime and deepened long-term resentment toward the United States.

The pattern continued into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In Panama in 1989, the U.S. invaded to oust General Manuel Noriega, a former U.S. ally turned target of drug and racketeering charges. And in the post-9/11 era, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were launched under the banners of counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction, respectively, and quickly morphed into protracted occupations. Both campaigns left behind fractured states, civilian suffering, and vacuums that fueled further conflict and the rise of extremist groups.

What is distinct about the U.S. action in Venezuela is not its intent, but its sheer visibility and audacity. Where earlier administrations relied on covert CIA operations, proxy groups, and plausible deniability, the 2026 operation unfolded like an open declaration of force, televised and acknowledged in real time. Yet the destabilizing effect — the disruption of national sovereignty, the undermining of regional stability, and the projection of U.S. strategic will — is the same.

America’s Permanent State of Exception

During the Cold War, “anti-communism” rationalized covert coups abroad and witch-hunts at home; after 9/11, “counter-terrorism” became the new passport for intervention. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) granted presidents open-ended authority to deploy military operations in at least 85 countries, without congressional approval. Under this banner, the U.S. built a transnational system of extraordinary rendition, torture sites, and warrantless surveillance, defended as safeguards of liberty. The Patriot Act extended the logic inward, normalizing mass data collection and criminalizing dissent under the amorphous label of “material support for terrorism.” This pattern reflects what political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a permanent “state of exception,” where democratic rights are routinely suspended in the name of national security.

Every foreign crusade leaves a domestic scar. The McCarthy era conflated dissent with disloyalty; COINTELPRO —initially used to disrupt the communist party— was expanded in the 60s to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war protests during the Vietnam War; the War on Terror entrenched surveillance and censorship. Since 2001, the Department of Homeland Security has distributed tens of billions of dollars in counterterrorism grants, while federal surplus programs have transferred billions more in military equipment to local police departments — accelerating the militarization of civilian law enforcement. Protest movements—from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter—have been surveilled using drones, facial recognition, and social-media monitoring programs originally designed for counter-insurgency. 

Nowhere is the language of “defending democracy” more hollow than in Palestine. For decades, the United States has supplied Israel with roughly $3.8 billion a year in military aid,  funding the occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, and the expansion of settlements deemed illegal under international law. This alliance is reinforced by powerful lobbying networks such as AIPAC, which funnels millions into U.S. elections to ensure bipartisan silence. Successive administrations have invoked “shared democratic values” to justify military aid even as Palestinians in the West Bank have been living under an illegal apartheid system for decades, and journalists, medics, and children in Gaza are killed with American-made weapons.

U.S. aid to Israel functions as a circuit of profit for the American military-industrial complex: over 85 percent of the funds are spent on U.S. weapons —with the goal of reaching 100% by 2028— ensuring a steady flow of contracts to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. In turn, Israel serves as a live-fire laboratory for technologies later exported back to the United States. Its arms industry markets drones, facial-recognition systems, and predictive-policing software as “battle-tested on Palestinians.” Many of these tools — from Elbit Systems’ border surveillance to NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware — have been adopted by U.S. agencies like the FBI, ICE and local police forces such as the NYPD, extending the logic of occupation to Black and Latinx neighborhoods under the banner of “public safety.”

A Dose of Perspective

A few months ago, I watched as Americans once again flooded the streets in a follow-up to the No Kings worldwide protests that swept cities in the spring of 2025. This time, I didn’t join them. The willingness of some organizing members to dismiss U.S. involvement in injustices abroad in the name of group cohesion made me question whether we were really fighting the same fight. I was disillusioned by a protest culture that seemed more invested in performance and partisan alignment than in confronting the deeper systems of power at work.

It’s not that I don’t believe things have gotten worse under the Trump administration. But as someone who has seen the abuses of power exercised under U.S. imperialism by both Democratic and Republican administrations, I recognize what many people of color have long understood: the crisis did not begin with him. Things feel newly intolerable only because Trump has made visible what was long buried in classified documents and private Oval Office debriefs, or cloaked in discourse about safeguarding domestic freedoms. 

Where previous presidents hid behind decorum and “diplomacy,” Trump governs through spectacle. He is sloppy and campy where others were polished and procedural. And if repression has escalated under his watch, it is only because he inherited state mechanisms that made it possible — and that will persist long after his presidency ends.

If lasting change is possible at all, it will not come from campaign slogans or the comforting fiction that removing one man will solve all of our nation’s ills. It begins by reckoning with the structures that have defined the United States since its inception — and with an honest question few are willing to ask: not on how to restore the "soul of the nation", but whether that soul is worth restoring after all.