The Country I Love Isn’t Trump’s America — True Patriotism Requires Honest Critique

When CBS News, under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, added “We Love America” to its five guiding principles and declared on social media, “And we make no apologies for saying so,” it raised an understandable question: why does a straight-news outlet feel compelled to announce patriotism rather than demonstrate it through rigorous reporting?

Putting aside the oddity of a newsroom distinguishing itself with a slogan, the formulation is reductive and Manichean. It erects a strawman opponent and implies there is a single correct way to love America: the network’s.

Rejecting Easy Binaries

There is, however, a kernel of truth to the argument. A segment of the far left — especially in some academic and activist circles — regards the United States as fundamentally illegitimate because of slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Other elements in left-leaning spaces prioritize radical critiques of capitalism, advance identity-based frameworks that sometimes polarize debate, or condone political violence in certain contexts.

I have criticized prominent figures in those movements when their arguments felt vacuous or counterproductive to the goals of justice and equality. But the public backlash against the far left far exceeds that faction’s real influence in government, business or mainstream culture. They have often functioned as useful bogeymen in Republican messaging and, at times, undermined their own case — as the comedian Marc Maron joked, “You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism, right?”

A Different Patriotism

Many of us can love America while rejecting both simplistic denunciations and blind patriotism. The America I love is a representative democracy where the losing party accepts electoral outcomes rather than attempting to cling to power or systematically poison its followers with false claims of voter fraud. It is a nation that respects civil liberties, upholds due process, and refuses to create legal exceptions to satisfy mass-deportation goals.

I love an America that stubbornly defends freedom of expression, does not weaponize regulatory threats against disfavored news outlets, and does not deport people for legitimate political activism. I love a country willing to confront its own history — even its worst chapters — and to learn and evolve from that reckoning.

Why Trump’s America Troubled Me

At the same time, the second Trump administration has shown how the country can backslide. I do not accept the renormalization of crude, public racism, which has been amplified by senior officials and high-profile supporters. This week, for example, an X (formerly Twitter) post containing an explicitly white-supremacist warning — “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. … White solidarity is the only way to survive” — received a visible reaction from Elon Musk and was viewed tens of millions of times.

Vice President J.D. Vance has made remarks — including a recent reference to a “Somali problem” — that echo dangerous, exclusionary rhetoric. Meanwhile, administrative moves tied to a satirical “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” narrative coincided with deep cuts to USAID, weakening U.S. soft power and hampering life-saving foreign-aid programs that cost a small fraction of GDP.

On foreign policy, I worry when the executive branch treats the Constitution as negotiable, launches military actions without clear congressional consultation, or entertains ambitions — such as threats to Greenland — that undermine the postwar rules-based order. I am alarmed by public affinities between some U.S. figures and Germany’s ascendant Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), a party with significant nationalist and extremist elements.

Domestically, recent developments have normalized opaque law-enforcement operations in which masked agents detain or arrest people without transparent due process. My earlier warnings about a drift toward normalizing extralegal violence now feel prescient: the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, and the celebratory reaction from some quarters underscore how grave this trend can be.

What Patriotism Should Be

“We Love America” functions more like a marketing slogan than a journalistic principle. True patriotism is not an instruction to ignore a nation’s flaws or to dismiss critics as unpatriotic. Loving your country means taking the good with the bad: being proud of our ideals while also insisting we hold ourselves accountable when we fall short.

You can love America while apologizing for its failures. But if “loving America” becomes a cover for defending the powerful, excusing racism, or asserting that military might alone confers moral rightness, then it is not love of country — it is the pleasure of proclaiming you do.