Donald Trump is weaponizing The American Dream against us

God forbid anyone but one of his cronies buy property to leave a legacy for their families.

Oct 14, 2025

Left to right: Marilyn Mosby, Lisa Cook and Letitia James.

When my mother came to this country in 1961, the mantra in her mind was simple: get a higher education, get a good job, own a home and a car, and give your family the gift of experiences: road trips, movies, the symphony, the library, museums, elaborate Christmases (well, as elaborate as you could get on an associate professor’s salary) scrimp for piano and tennis lessons for the kids, and make sure they go to college, too. This and attending church every Sunday and sending us to vacation Bible school and bringing our cousins from New York some summers so we wouldn’t be bored, pretty much constituted her American dream. It’s the one most Americans my age and older grow up with, though many also included, “get married,” which my mother tried, but pops turned out to be a player.

Donald Trump grew up with a different mantra, per to my reading of his niece, Mary’s books about her family, and my own research for my Trump book, The Man Who Sold America: never admit you lost, get richer, and get even.

Which brings us to the latest sinister undercurrent to Trump’s second term version of “Make America Great Again.” What we already knew to be a neofascist, white Christian nationalist personality cult attached to the image and celebrity of our kleptocratic megalomaniac in chief, has spawned a chilling new canon: that anyone who isn’t a white, straight, conservative Christian man, or a conservative woman married to a white, conservative Christian man, has no real claim on either America, or the American dream.

We’ve heard versions of the canon articulated by everyone from Tucker Carlson with his past promotion of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory to Charlie Kirk’s “prowling Blacks” and replacement rhetoric to the principal weirdos in Trumpland: JD Vance and Stephen “1930s cosplay” Miller; though few have made it plainer than “blood and soil” Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt:

For Latinos, even ardently Catholic or protestant Christian Latinos (who apparently don’t get to join the Christian nationalist club, no matter how MAGA they are,) this idea has played out with exceptional brutality, such that whether or not they are U.S. citizens, their presence on the streets of this country can be questioned anytime, anywhere, apartheid-style, by seemingly random, often masked, armed men; with or without warrants in hand. The “mass deportation/mass deportation” ICE jump-outs are being rolled out in nearly every blue city. And Brown people caught up in them can be physically removed to any place those armed men choose to take them, and held for as long as they say. For all intents and purposes, the Fourth Amendment, which states that:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

… no longer applies to anyone who looks or sounds like a foreigner to anyone claiming to be “federal law enforcement” or “ICE.” Even the historic American fealty to property rights goes out the door when the need to immediately remove Brown people presents itself.

And so, just as during America’s slave empire era, any Black person caught by slave catchers could be spirited back to bondage — or into it, if they happened to already be free — there is no relief from Trump’s modern-day slave catchers. You can be kidnapped in broad daylight and anyone who tries to help you is subject to arrest or extrajudicial murder. The Supreme Court has effectively said this is so. The necessity of reducing the Brown population of this country is apparently that much of an “emergency.” And so, like the infamous Taney court before it, the Roberts court has essentially decreed that anyone who looks or sounds like an “illegal alien” to an armed, masked, random white man on the street has no rights that MAGA men are bound to respect. And if the kidnappers turn out to be proud boys, oath keepers, Boogaloo Boyz or 3 percenters … I guess John Roberts figures Kash Patel will sort out the bodies later.

So, what does that have to do with the American dream? If you are a Latino or Latina, it means that your family is inherently second class. And your pursuit of economic opportunity, whether as a DREAMer, a citizen, or an undocumented worker toiling away in American farm fields, on construction sites or restaurant kitchens has been invalidated under law. That pursuit is now teeming with physical peril, merely because of the way you look and speak. You’re not even safe in your apartment at 1:00 in the morning. Nor are your children. Same goes for you if you are an Asian immigrant—since you’re a target, too. And as we discovered when we were in Utah for the last Sundance Film Festival, even indigenous Americans are facing the indignity of having their presence challenged by armed colonizers … again.

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Under MAGA, the American dream is solely for white, conservative Christians (and Trump cronies)

While Black Americans have caught tremendous strays from the MAGA obsession with halting their own forward march into minority status by removing as many Latinos, as violently and publicly as possible, Donald Trump has an even more personal message for us.

While the junior Senator from the state that in 1847 literally banned free Black people from moving there (or learning to read and right if they already lived there as slaves) merely expressed antipathy for those not born of his hue and background, Trump is getting his Injustice Department to literally exclude, fire and prosecute Black folks en masse.

Fueled by Trump’s blanket ban on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, his wholly unqualified defense secretary Pete Hegseth has aggressively ordered the mass deletion of the very existence of Black heroes from the military’s online memory banks. And when he’s not conducting a full-on ideological purge at the Pentagon and pushing Black and women military leaders out of their jobs, the scandal-plagued former Fox “News” host is jamming through policies that will make it harder for Black men, and nearly any woman, to serve. Notably, the U.S. military has been a primary engine boosting Black Americans into the middle class, and Black Americans and immigrants serve in disproportionate numbers. Well, at least they did.

And that’s not the only way Black middle class aspirations are being hobbled by the Trump regime.

Federal government employment has been an equally important pillar of Black economic advancement. At a time when segregation was still a hardened reality in this country, the federal government became a kind of employer of last resort; offering good, solid jobs with civil service protections against racial discrimination. Generations of Black Americans sought gainful employment in the U.S. Postal Service and the D.C. civil service, in administrative jobs that ranged from middle management in the various agencies to members of the White House secretarial pool. Federal employment was not just an economic engine, it was a source of tremendous pride among Black Americans, who jumped at the opportunity to help build this country yet again, only this time by supporting the services that make life in America work for ordinary people.

Many current federal workers, Black and white, are children of retired federal workers, or were inspired to the work by family friends. And it is Black women federal workers in particular, who Trump and Russ Vought have seemed to specifically target for removal. Black women have been the most aggressively removed federal workers under Trump’s implementation of Project 2025, with 300,000 plus exiting the workforce nationwide just through July. And they are promising more to come.

Apparently, what Trump meant by “Black jobs” are a combination of old timey field labor and the non-field related kind you can eliminate without a bribey, taxpayer-funded bailout, like the (white) farmers are going to get. I’m guessing Black farmers need not apply, since that would be considered “DEI…”

The mass firings and furloughs, which Trump and Vought are vowing to make permanent, have hit Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia like an economic carpet bomb; triggering a spike in unemployment and a teetering housing market.

It feels deliberate.

Likewise, Trump is hyper-targeting other pillars of Black advancement: access to higher education, which he and Stephen Miller and the right wing Supreme Court majority have sought to choke off by killing affirmative action; and opportunities for employment advancement, which the regime has tried to end emphatically by bullying weak willed corporations into killing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. They’ve even tried to decree that Black women can’t even help other Black women pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

And then there is that ultimate American dream: home ownership; which Trump is targeting through his DOJ and its sycophant leader, Pam Bondi, along with Trump’s trolly director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, real estate development nepo baby Bill Pulte — grandson of the founder of the multibillion dollar home building giant, Pulte Group, and their new attack dog: slavery in museums truther, Linsdey Halligan.

An enthusiastic MAGA Twitter troll, Pulte has set aside “the dull but critical task of ensuring the soundness of the mortgage market,” and “has instead transformed the position into a megaphone to denigrate Trump’s perceived political foes.” And his targets have perfectly aligned with Trump’s grievance list: he is the one who referred New York attorney general Letitia James to the Justice Department for investigation of mortgage fraud. And he has also “probed Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor appointed by President Joe Biden. Both are now under federal criminal investigation.” All just as Daddy ordered:

Halligan, the former insurance lawyer and former Miss Colorado finalist Trump whisked out of her very important job of ridding “his” national museums of icky slavery references to instead be installed as the U.S. attorney in Virginia, brought the case — alone — after no real Justice Department lawyer would touch it, and two others were fired for being honest about there being no legitimate cases against Attorney General James and Comey, who Trump also demanded be indicted for invented crimes — after which he was.

But it is the Cook and James cases, coming on top of the Trump Department of Injustice indicting and convicting former Baltimore D.A. Marilyn Mosby for supposed mortgage fraud for ~~using her own 401K to purchase properties in Florida~~ putting the police officers who killed Freddie Gray on trial, that tell the tale. As part of her sentence, Mosby was initially stripped of 90 percent of her properties’ value, gutting the generational wealth she’d tried to purchase for her daughters. (Last year, an appeals court overturned the mortgage fraud convictions and reversed the order that she forfeit her properties, though they left a perjury conviction intact.)

Mosby was just the start.

Trump and his cronies are now fully weaponizing the very idea of Black home ownership to take down successful members of the demographic that most fiercely resisted him, all three times that he ran for president. Black women are the most hardcore opponents of Trump and MAGA; the most resistant to its entreaties, and Black women sit in spaces where they have achieved the status to provide oversight over various aspects of government. And in those seats, Black women have prosecuted and investigated Trump, as James successfully did in New York civil court for defrauding the state of hundreds of millions of dollars by levering the value of his properties up or down, depending on whether he wanted loans or insurance — something his own longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to under oath in Congress in 2019:

Black women served as judges and juries in his multiple trials — including the one making him a 34-count felon (the prosecutor in that case being a Black man) and made Trump and his cult look foolish on a daily basis. And so for Trump; Black women are meant to have nothing. Their attempts to purchase property will be weaponized against them. This as at least three of Trump’s own cabinet members literally hold dual mortgages precisely like the ones Halligan is prosecuting A.G. James over and that Pulte referred Lisa Cook and Senator Adam Schiff to the DOJ for.

A case as thin as cheap toilet paper

Worse: the cases Trump is demanding be made against his perceived enemies aren’t even sound.

James has hired formidable attorney Abbe Lowell, who submitted a detailed letter to Attorney General Bondi, laying out the weaknesses in the case against his client; and they are many, including Pulte and Trump’s blatant targeting of A.G. James: