The Day the Mask Fell

“I was raised to believe America fought against the Nazis. Now we are the Nazis.”

We were driving back from the store when it happened.

The news had already broken. Trump’s “successful” airstrikes on Iran were flashing across phones, feeds, and screens. Fordow. Natanz. Esfahan. Three hardened nuclear sites, bombed without debate, without warning, without congressional consent. The B-2s safely home. The commander-in-chief posting triumphantly on Truth Social while the world held its breath.

And then my daughter, Sarah, 30 years old, began to cry.

“I was raised to believe America fought against the Nazis,” she said softly.
“Now we are the Nazis.”

There it was. The collapse of an entire national mythology condensed into one painful truth.

We were taught that America stood apart. That whatever its flaws, it stood against authoritarianism, fascism, the naked projection of military power. That our bombs were righteous, our wars just, our leaders accountable.

But that was always the myth. The reality was darker, though carefully concealed.

We backed juntas, installed dictators, orchestrated coups. From Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1973, from Guatemala to Congo, from Vietnam to Iraq, the list is long, and the casualties immense. We sold “freedom” while strangling democracies abroad. We preached self-determination while subverting governments that dared chart independent paths. We cloaked economic domination in the language of liberation.

For many Americans, especially those privileged to live inside the protected shell of the empire, that myth held together for decades. The real price, the bombs, the torture sites, the secret prisons, the disappeared, was paid by others, far away.

But now, the mask has fallen here, at home.
The violence that once sustained imperial projection outward is now fully turned inward, against law, against democracy, against our own people.

Sarah’s grief cuts straight through the patriotic storybook we were fed. She sees what we have become. What we may have always been, beneath the flag-wrapped language.

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Now? A sovereign war against a sovereign nation launched by presidential fiat, announced via a triumphant social media post littered with emojis and self-congratulation:

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran... A full payload of BOMBS was dropped... Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

Far more than just a grotesque update, it is classic strongman propaganda.

Total control of narrative. No press conference. No joint session of Congress. No debate. Just the Leader speaking directly to the People.

Triumphalism. American exceptionalism wrapped in militarism, feeding the fantasy that power alone defines virtue.

Preemptive justification. Having launched an unprovoked strike, he declares “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE,” as though aggression itself is diplomacy.

Erasure of law. No mention of legality, no authorization of force, no vote, no accountability. There is no state separate from the man; the man is the state.

This is how failed superpowers behave when stripped of internal constraints but still armed with overwhelming force.

We have been warning that America was teetering on the edge of authoritarian collapse. This strike has pushed us past the line. What my daughter named through her tears is what so many others are now being forced to see:

We have become what we once claimed to oppose. The war is no longer just overseas. It is here in the slow death of constitutional order. In the normalization of rule by personal decree. In the use of war not as national defense, but as regime theater.

The tragedy is not that Trump launched a war after golfing all day. The tragedy is that he could and there was nothing to stop him.

Congress? Reduced to a spectator.
The courts? Silent.
The military? Following orders.
The media? Fragmented.
The public? Fractured between horror and celebration.

This is what authoritarian collapse looks like inside a powerful empire: not chaos, but empty procedural formality hollowed out by executive impunity. The outward machinery of a state still functions, Congress meets, courts hold hearings, elections are scheduled, but the levers of real power have shifted entirely to the executive, unbound by law, unrestrained by institutions.

This is the anatomy of a failed state inside a functioning economy. Not failure in the way we associate with collapsed nations, no starvation, no currency collapse, no warlords in the streets. But failure at the core: a regime that no longer answers to its own constitutional design. A system where war can be launched by one man, legality is irrelevant, and accountability is performative theater.

As the bombs have fallen so to has the the mask. The republic has fallen into managed failure, a superpower with all its weapons and wealth intact, but stripped of the internal constraints that once distinguished it from the very regimes it claimed to oppose.

What comes next will not be decided in courtrooms or on campaign stages. It will be decided by how many citizens can still see what Sarah saw. How many are willing to say it aloud. How many are willing to resist what’s already happening now, not what might happen someday.